How AEM Communities leverages and extends the power of Sling

AEM Communities helps you create online community experiences. Online communities are designed to be highly engaging, interactive experiences. They often have to handle very high volumes of user generated content and also present dynamic personalized content to end users.

In this session, we will take a look at how AEM Communities leverages the power of Sling and extends its capabilities to create highly customizable and dynamic components that are capable of handling large volumes of user generated content.

We will dive into the Social Component Framework (SCF). SCF is a framework developed by the AEM Communities team in order to create components that can deliver dynamic content. The framework allows you to build components that behave like mini single-page (or single viewport) applications by leveraging client side (isomorphic) rendering using templates and JSON endpoints. SCF is designed to make components highly customizable and extensible while simultaneously providing a robust HTTP API (based on Sling standards) that allows for integrations with other clients and systems. We will take a detailed look at how the Social Component Framework leverages various capabilities of Sling/OSGi to achieve this.

We will learn about the Storage Resource Provider (SRP) - a custom resource provider that allows you to store data (user generated content) in a shared/scalable storage alternative such as MongoDB or in the cloud. We will also see how AEM Communities offers powerful search capabilities by integrating with Solr.

Lastly we will learn how to utilize SCF and SRP to rapidly build scalable dynamic applications.