Category: CMS

Written by Kapil Viren Ahuja

AEM Development Workflow – Part 3 (Coding Old School)


The journey was nothing but painful all along the way. It took me 5 hours to do what should have been a few minutes job. The Site developer had the code up and running in a HTML file in a browser and all I had to do was to make it work “as is” within CQ. It seemed like the Force of Nature were working against me and everything I did, had a problem in it. I finally got it up and running (the designs done match off as is still), but it was excruciating pain.

Written by Kapil Viren Ahuja

AEM Development Workflow – Part 2 (finding the problem)


The AEM workflow problem is not really an inefficiency in the handover of HTMLs to CQ developers but how we should have been writing the code to begin with. We start here by seeing where the problem starts and how the code has been written. Unfortunately, we do see the OOTB Code in AEM as provided by Adobe itself are not coded to solve the problem. When I speak with Adobe they make it clear that these are reference sites and are to used as “Self-learning” but little did they know at the time that people will take this a practice and convert this into a culture.

Written by Kapil Viren Ahuja

AEM Development Workflow – Part 1 (introduction)


What I want to do here is to compare 3 workflows and see what each one has to offer and what’s the best possible way to remove this inefficiency or improve productivity.
1. Follow the current set of technologies JSP-Java but change the way of working aka different set of tools, trainings and processes
2. Use Sightly ~ the new templating language pushed by AEM
3. Use other templating languages like handlebars or angular which are more platform agnostic and goes beyond just CMS and AEM (old school application development also fits)

Written by Kapil Viren Ahuja

Thick Clients and CMS


Can a technology like Angular be used in the world of a CMS to solve the process problems where it just takes too long to get HTMLs from Site Developers into CQ’s templates and that too with a degree of quality that we are expected to deliver. This article lays down the foundation of what the challenges are and how it has started to impact our day to day life. The answer is not that simple, but at the looks of it, it seems we are using a technology to solve for a problem which is actually a people or a process problem. You can of course introduce a new component in the mix, but I still believe until people are ready to change, this new component wont do shit.

Written by Kapil Viren Ahuja

Caching Architecture (Adobe AEM) – Part 1


If you ever have designed or want to design a platform/site that needs to support some steep non-functional requirements like 1Billion hits, then you have to rever to using cache as a key part of the framework. How cache as we have known it back in the days is not longer just plugging in a library and start writing to it. There is a lot more to it when we talk in context of a Digital Media platform and how you deal with very high loads. This article will talk about principles that will help you design for
– Performance: Caching is a pattern that we employ to increase the overall performance the application by storing the (processed) data in a store that is a) closest to the consumer of the data and b) is accessible quickly
– Scalability: In cases when we need to make the same data-set available to various consumers of the system, caching as a pattern makes it possible for us to scale the systems much better. Caching as we discussed earlier allows us to have processed data which takes away the need to run the same processing time and again which facilitates scalability
– Availability: Building on similar principles as of scalability, caching allows us to put in place data in areas where systems/components can survive outages be it network or other components. While it may lead to surfacing stale data at points, the systems are still available to the end users.

Written by Kapil Viren Ahuja

A POV on Slice (a Adobe CQ Framework)


To sum it up in plain english – Not a lot of rope to hang off of; very little use cases to use and not exciting me as much.

For anything that is enterprise or platform(ish), I won’t go for this. The technical overhead that this framework and what it solves for is not worth the ROI of managing another framework. If I’d come across strongly types content-types, I would consider to use this. The ultimate tie breaker would be how how many of the content-types need to be displayed “as-is”. If all i had to show are several compositions of data (search or what have you) maybe not. But, definitely something to consider

Written by Kapil Viren Ahuja

Modeling Content in CQ54


CQ54 is not a a typical RDBMS where I can model a set of relationships in table and soon a pretty picture starts to present itself. CQ54 stores everything in its content repository (CRX) as nodes which follow an entirely different data model i.e. Hierarchical Structure. My experience with hierarchical databases has been with day […]

Written by Kapil Viren Ahuja

OSGI: The new Toy


I heard about OSGI sometime early last year, but I did not care about it – it meant start thinking about a new way of development and deployment (thats what I heard from my friends) and I did not want to learn something else when Spring worked great for me. And, my colleagues who spoke […]