I am doing this blog now for quite some time (the first article in this blog dates back to December 2008! That was the time of CQ 5.0! OMG), and of course I am not the only one writing on AEM. Actually the number of articles which are produced every months is quite large, but I am often a bit disappointed because many just reproduce some very basic aspects of AEM, which can be found at many places. But the amount of new content which describe aspects which have barely been covered by other blog posts or the official product documentation is small.
For myself I try to focus on such topics, offer unique views on the product and provide recommendations how things can be done (better), all based on my personal experiences. I think that this type of content is appreciated by the community, and I get good feedback on it. To encourage the broader community to come up with more content covering new aspects I will do a little experiment and promote a few selected articles of others. I think that these article show new aspects or offer a unique view on certain on AEM.
Depending on the feedback I will decide i will continue with this experiment. If you think that your content also offers new views, uncovers hidden features or suggests best practices, please let me know (see the my contact data here). I will judge these proposals on the above mentioned criteria. But of course it will be still my personal decision.
Let’s start with Theo Pendle, who has written an article on how to write your own custom injector for Sling Models. The example he uses is a real good one, and he walks you through all the steps and explains very well, why that is all necessary. I like the general approach of Theos writing and consider the case of safely injecting cookie values as a valid for such a injector. But in general I think that there are not many other cases out there, where it makes sense to write custom injectors.
Also on a technical level John Mitchell has his article “Using Sling Feature Flags to Manage Continous Releases“, published on the Adobe Tech Blog. He introduces Sling Features and how you can use them to implement Feature Flags. And that’s something I have not seen used yet in the wild, and also the documentation is quite sparse on it. But he gives a good starting point, although a more practical example would be great 🙂
The third article I like the most. Kevin Nenning writes on “CRXDE Lite, the plague of AEM“. He outlines why CRXDE Lite has gained such a bad reputation within Adobe, that disabling CRXDE Lite is part of the golive checklist for quite some time. But on the other hand he loves the tool because it’s a great way for quick hacks on your local development instance and for a general read-only tool. This is an article every AEM developer should read.
And in case you haven’t seen it yet: AEM as a Cloud Service offers the repository browser in the developer console for a read-only view on your repo!
And finally there is Yuri Simione (an Adobe AEM champion), who published 2 articles discussing the question “Is AEM a valid Content Services Plattform?” (article 1, article 2). He discusses an implementation which is based on Jackrabbit/Oak and Sling (but not AEM) to replace an aging Documentum system. And finally he offers an interesting perspective on the future of Jackrabbit. Definitely a read if you are interested in a more broader use of AEM and its foundational pieces.
That’s it for December. I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I did, and that you can learn from them and get some new inspiration and insights.
Things on a content management system 