Open Source of Grabbit

By now my list of social media contacts that know of and/or work with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM or previously known as CQ5) has grown quite a bit. I’d like to share the announcement that a project that has started within my work group at Time Warner Cable has gone open source. A project which we called Grabbit has made it’s way through all the legal loop holes to become an open source project!

Grabbit is a tool that provides fast (and I mean really fast) content copies of the JCR between AEM instances. Other tools have been developed to do this using vault (vlt), but copy times for large amounts of data on the enterprise have been sluggish at best.  Grabbit is different in that it uses Google Protocol Buffers  and Spring Batch (chunk based processing) to move data in a much more efficient way.  Depending on the data being copied, we’ve seen improvements up to 10x in speed.  For us (and I’m sure lots of organizations using AEM) this allows us to keep our lower test environments up to date with production content on a much more frequent and regular basis.

We hope others in the AEM community will find our project and help us to make it better.  After all, that’s what open source is for. With the release of Grabbit Time Warner has begun to open it’s doors to several other open source projects.  You can find Grabbit and the other Time Warner Cable open source projects here on GitHub.  We’ve got a good base down now, but there is still work to be done.  If you’d like to know more about Grabbit feel free to contact me or check us out on GitHub.

Grabbit was largely designed by Sagar Sane with guidance from our lead architect Jim Moore and additional help from others in the Time Warner Cable web portals team (I may have written a class for it woo hoo 😛 ). I’d like to give a big thanks to Sagar for sticking with the project and Jim for organizing the release of it through management and legal to bring this to the open source community.