Updating OpenCms 3rd party libraries

The goal of this project was to update all 3rd partry libraries to their recent version and get rid of the patched commons-email.jar.

Performed changes

  • Originally, an alpha version of the Apache library Commons Email was adopted by OpenCms developers to OpenCms specific needs. With the official release of the version 1.0 of the Commons Email library, Apache developers had changed (of course amongst others) the signatures of crucial methods and also the exception concept. All Exceptions had to be changed from their respective javax.mail.MessagingException (including its subclasses) counterparts to the org.apache.commons.mail.EmailException of the Commons Email project. For this reason, with the update to the latest version of the commons-email.jar a few OpenCms classes needed to get refactored. This resulted in changes of the following classes:
    • org.opencms.mail.CmsHtmlJava
    • org.opencms.mail.CmsMailTransport
    • org.opencms.mail.CmsMultiPartMail
    • org.opencms.mail.CmsSimpleMail
    • org.opencms.mail.Messages
    • org.opencms.newsletter.CmsNewsletter
    • org.opencms.notification.A_CmsNotification
    • org.opencms.notification.CmsNotificaitonCandidates
    • org.opencms.frontend.templateone.CmsTemplateFormLetter
    • org.opencms.frontend.templateone.CmsTemplateFormRecommend
    • org.opencms.workplace.tools.workplace.broadcast. CmsMessageInfo
    Furthermore, a new entry was added to the property file org.opencms.mail.messages.properties.
    Two more classes were created to be able to test the mail functionality:
    • org.opencms.mail.AllTests
    • org.opencms.mail.TestCmsMail
    For further information regarding the Unit-Tests please consult the JUnit description.
  • The behaviour of the method ConvertUtils#convert(String) of commons-beanutils changed so it returned an empty String ("") instead of null if null was passed in as an argument. This resulted in a small change in the class org.opencms.configuration.CmsSetNextRule#end(String,String) (see patch for details)
  • The update of quartz to version 1.6.0 added a method to the interface org.quartz.spi.ThreadPool which is implemented by org.opencms.scheduler.CmsSchedulerThreadPool. This method has been implemented (see patch for details)
  • The update of quartz required adding jta-1.0.1b.jar to the libraries

Problems & future tasks

  • POI although out of date was not updated because some test cases fail if the libs are replaced. This needs further investigation.
  • Build a complete distribution and test it with a variety of modules
  • Send modifications to dumbster upstream
  • PDFBox version update broke tast cases. This needs further investigations.
  • TextMining version update broke test cases. This needs further investigations.
  • The JDBC drivers weren't tasked in lack of the respective database servers. The following drivers need testing:
    • MySQL 5
    • PostgreSQL
    • MSSQL
    • Oracle

Results

Latest News

  • OpenCms 16 available

    Oct 2, 2023 - OpenCms 16 brings the new app "Unused contents" that allows to find and delete content that is not actively used on any container page. It is now possible to select between several individual detail pages in the same website based on categories of the detail content. It can now be enforced that all content managers must set a new password after the next login. The default Mercury template brings several new features, e.g. the "Image tile display" formatter for the "Tabs / accordion" element.

  • OpenCms 16 Release Notes

    Oct 2, 2023 - The OpenCms 16 release notes contain detailed information about the new features and fixes in this version.

  • Alkacon OCEE 16

    Oct 2, 2023 - Alkacon OCEE 16 is the latest OCEE release for OpenCms 16. This version fixes an issue where deleting a user/group didn't flush the ACL cache.

  • OpenCms 15 available

    Apr 25, 2023 - OpenCms 15 provides role-based control to restrict who is allowed to update the sitemap configuration, including an editor for modifying selected sitemap attributes by any content manager. The new launchpad app "Person data search" reveals personal user data stored in the VFS. The Mercury template adds more than 1800 optional icons from the Bootstrap collection and numerous further enhancements.