Tonight, Blue Fish held our annual client appreciation dinner. This is our opportunity to say thanks to all of our clients who have supported us over the years. This year, the site of the event was the Shark’s Underwater Grill at SeaWorld. We ate in a giant aquarium, surrounded by sharks, stingrays, and other fish. It was quite a sight. Overall, more than 60 of our clients joined us, and it was a lot of fun.

Earlier today, I spent some time learning about the architectural improvements in the upcoming D6 release of Documentum. Below are some of the things that caught my eye today.

Documentum Foundation Services

• EMC is releasing a set of out-of-the-box web services called Documentum Foundation Services (DFS). DFS provides a higher-level interface for interacting with the content server, encapsulating several DFC calls into a single DFS method. Most of the services you would need to do basic content management will ship in D6, and EMC has committed to eventually providing DFS services for 100% of the Documentum platform, including services for Rich Media and Web Content Management.
• If you are calling DFS locally (from within the same application server), you’ll be able to use a DFS Client Library to call DFS directly, without the performance penalty of marshalling and unmarshalling XML/SOAP calls. If you later decide to deploy your application remotely, you can flip a switch and your application will start using the web services interface to DFS.

Java DMCL

As I mentioned yesterday, there is now a Java DMCL. I learned a bit more today.

• The old DMCL was optimized for client-server environments where a thick client acquired a session and kept it for a long time. Using this DMCL in a web environment was very inefficient, since application servers typically keep a session alive only for the length of the request (less than a second). The new Java DMCL is optimized for a web environment.
• The Java DMCL has eliminated the need for a JNI bridge to allow DFC to communicate with the old DMCL. This has actually improved performance by 25% for single-user applications and by 40% for multi-user applications. There is also a reduction in memory usage, allowing your application server to process more concurrent connections than it could previously.