AEM Architecture

Introduction

In this article, we will discuss the "Adobe Experience Manager" platform. I feel everyone knows about Content Management Systems. The AEM is one of the best CMS and most of the top premises are using this tool for their digital market business. This tool especially plays a vital role in eCommerce platforms. 

Architecture 

Traditional System

In the conventional system, we have the CMS as What you see is what you get (WYSIWYG). There is not much engineering effort required, the end user can able to do it with the help of the DIY approach. Here we have only a couple of phases, one is the front end and another component is the Content Management System, perhaps all the static images are stored as Images or Blobs. It's good however we need to do some redundant work to accomplish for different operators. 

This is good for small-scale industries, but if you want to maintain the common repository and would like to supply to different consumers then it's a bit of extra work, such as we need to duplicate our work as per consumers to accomplish these scenarios. 

Headless CMS approach

Typically headless approach means an API approach, we are trying to give responsibility for each and individual component, also we are applying a common repository pattern. With the help of the AEM stack, we can implement this methodology. In this scenario, all data are stored in the respective CTX database. Basically, CTX is work as a No-SQL kind. In the cloud environment, you can opt for S3 instead of CTX. 

Here the author is the one who creates a design with multiple components with the help of AEM wizard and those are stored in CTX or S3. With this headless approach, you can get data as an API response. The recommendation here is to apply GraphQL because you can get what you want as JSON instead of getting all data, which eventually compromises a few complaints.

Once it's published to the repository, now the client may be Mobile App/ browser / IoT device that can able to consume whatever they want and they can manipulate this data as per their demand. 

In this approach we no need to worry about how the system should be, instead, we concentrate more on the data perspective side. 

I hope this gives a clear idea of why and how we are using the AEM system.