Development

Adobe provides the following links as additional, supplemental information based on goals, use case needs, and discussions within lab sessions. This information is intended to augment the experience gained from the Customer Experience Lab curriculum.

AEM as a Cloud Service Documentation Home  — Full product documentation hub covering all AEM Cloud Service solutions

What's Different from AEM On-Premise and AMS  — How the cloud architecture changes the developer experience: ephemerality, clustering, immutable vs. mutable content, and no OSGi web console

Development Guidelines  — Core rules for writing cloud-safe code: no filesystem state, resilient background jobs, HTTP timeout requirements, and cluster-aware patterns

AEM Architecture Overview  — The logical and service architecture: author/publish/preview tiers, Cloud Manager's role, and how environments are typed (dev, stage, production, RDE)

SDK Overview & Quickstart Jar Setup  — Downloading the SDK, starting author (4502) and publish (4503) instances from the command line, and strategies for persisting content between SDK upgrades

AEM Maven Project Archetype  — Project structure, package layout, and the separation of mutable vs. immutable content in the standard Maven multi-module project

Dispatcher SDK & Tools  — Running and validating Dispatcher configuration locally using Docker before pushing to Cloud Manager

WKND Tutorial: Getting Started  — End-to-end reference implementation covering component development, HTL, Sling Models, and project structure in the context of AEM as a Cloud Service

HTL (HTML Template Language)  — AEM's server-side templating language: expressions, block statements, and how it interfaces with Sling Models

Sling Models  — Annotation-driven Java POJOs for mapping JCR properties and OSGi services to component logic; the standard pattern for backing HTL components

OSGi Configuration  — Using .cfg.json files scoped by run mode (config.author, config.publish.prod, etc.); inline, environment-specific, and secret variable patterns

Content Package Structure  — Immutable vs. mutable content, why install hooks are not supported, and how Cloud Manager transforms packages to the Sling Feature Model at deploy time

Core Components  — Adobe's extensible, production-ready component library and the recommended base for custom component development

Deploying to AEM as a Cloud Service  — How Cloud Manager pipelines work, the relationship between custom code releases and AEM version updates, and the immutable code-in-git requirement

Rapid Development Environments (RDE)  — Using the aio aem:rde:install CLI to push OSGi bundles, configs, dispatcher zips, and content packages directly to an RDE without running a full pipeline

Cloud Manager CI/CD Pipelines  — Full and config-only pipeline types, code quality gates, and the relationship between stage and production deployments

Environment Variables & Secrets  — Setting environment-specific and secret values via Cloud Manager that get injected into OSGi configurations at runtime

Content Fragments & Models API  — OpenAPIs for full CRUD operations on Content Fragments and Models, with per-language code samples for headless integration scenarios

AEM Headless Developer Portal  — GraphQL API, Content Fragment models, persisted queries, and delivery patterns for headless AEM implementations

Universal Editor Integration  — Adding data- attributes to existing web app markup to enable in-context visual editing without requiring AEM-hosted rendering

Web-Optimized Image Delivery APIs  — Using the AssetDelivery OSGi service to serve WEBP renditions from AEM as a Cloud Service while gracefully falling back on the local SDK

Dispatcher in the Cloud  — How Dispatcher runs in AEM as a Cloud Service: managed via Cloud Manager, all config in Git, and validation via the Dispatcher SDK before deployment

CDN Configuration  — Adobe-managed CDN setup, BYO CDN configuration, cache invalidation behavior, and response header rules

Dispatcher Cache Rules & Invalidation  — Configuring what gets cached at the Dispatcher and CDN layers, TTLs, and how publish replication triggers invalidation

Developer Console  — Read-only OSGi web console equivalent for cloud environments: inspect bundles, components, Sling Models, oak indexes, and query performance per pod

Log Access via Cloud Manager  — Downloading or tailing author, publish, and dispatcher logs per environment via Cloud Manager UI or the Adobe I/O CLI

Repository Initialization (RepoInit)  — Declaring service users, ACLs, and initial JCR paths via OSGi factory configuration scripts that run at deploy time