Thursday, October 29, 2020

AEM SPA

 

AEM SPA


*      Single page applications (SPAs) can offer compelling experiences for website users. By being faster, fluid, and more like a native application

*      SPA becomes a very attractive experience, developers want to be able to build sites using SPA frameworks and authors want to seamlessly edit content within AEM for a site built using such frameworks.

*      The SPA Editor offers a comprehensive solution for supporting SPAs within AEM.

*      When an SPA is built to leverage the AEM SPA Editor, the content author notices no difference when editing and creating content.


Important Points:

·         The Single-Page Application (SPA) Editor feature requires AEM 6.4 service pack 2 or newer.

·         The SPA Editor is the recommended solution for projects that require SPA framework based client-side rendering (React or Angular).

·         All SPA projects on AEM should be based on the Maven Archetype for SPA Starter Kit.

 

How SPA is different?

A single-page application (SPA) differs from a conventional page is that it is rendered client-side and is primarily Javascript-driven, relying on Ajax calls to load data and dynamically update the page. 

This reduces the need for page refreshes and presents an experience to the user that is seamless, fast, and feels more like a native app experience. 

             (Sequential web page)                                 (Single Page Application)



In a traditional, sequential web page, only the data needed for the immediate page is loaded. This means that when the visitor moves to another page, the server is called for the additional resources. 

Any SPA project on AEM should leverage the Maven Archetype for SPA Starter Kit.

 

AEM has provided sample SPA Website “we-retail-journal” below is the link:

https://github.com/adobe/aem-sample-we-retail-journal

You can directly download and build this project using command

mvn clean install –PautoInstallPackage

You can see the your single page Application working

Project Structure in AEM



Guidelines for SPA development in AEM

 

Developing single page applications on AEM assumes that the front-end developer observes standard best practices when creating an SPA.

·         *Portability* - As with any components, the components should be built to be as portable as possible. The SPA should be built with portable and reusable components.

·         *AEM Drives Site Structure* - The front end developer creates components and owns their internal structure, but relies on AEM to define the content structure of the site.

·         *Dynamic Rendering* - All rendering should be dynamic.

·         *Dynamic Routing* - The SPA is responsible for the routing and AEM listens to it and fetches based on it. Any routing should be dynamic as well.

If you keep these principles in mind as you develop your SPA, it will be as flexible and supports AEM authoring functionality.

For further details about SPA development on AEM including guidelines, walkthroughs, best practices and examples go to https://adobe.com/go/aem-dev-spa.

 

 

Deep dive into AEM SPA

 

The basic concept of SPA is to map a SPA Component to an AEM Component. AEM components, runs on server-side, which exports content in the form of JSON. The JSON content is consumed by the SPA, running on client-side in the browser. A 1:1 mapping between SPA components and an AEM component is created.

 

To build for AEM, the SPA project is compiled and automatically included in the AEM project.

Standard AEM Packages used to deploy the SPA into AEM.

SPA development iterations occur independently of AEM. When the SPA is ready to be deployed into AEM the following high-level steps take place (as illustrated above).

 

 ·         The AEM project build is invoked, which in turn triggers a build of the SPA project. The We.Retail Journal uses the frontend-maven-plugin .

·         The SPA project's aem-clientlib-generator embeds the compiled SPA as an AEM Client Library in the AEM project.

·         The AEM project generates an AEM package, including the compiled SPA, plus any other supporting AEM code.

 

 

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