Ionic AEM Apps Library Release

AEM Apps is an AEM Module exposing numerous utilities, dashboards, and integrations supporting the development of Phonegap/Cordova applications within AEM and their build processes within Phonegap Build.  This module, however, while opinionated concerning the scaffolding of your AEM App project, is not opinionated concerning the manner in which you develop within AEM.  Developing Apps instead of websites relies on the overcoming of numerous mental and technical hurdles presented by the nature of mobile applications as distinct from the nature of web applications or websites.  This means notable ramp-up time and considerable room for the creation of “Technical Debt” due to a lack of understanding on these fronts.  To help overcome this challenge, we have released the Ionic AEM Apps Library.

The Ionic AEM Apps Library aims to provide opinions concerning how applications should be built in AEM Apps based on our experience in building Phonegap/Cordova applications both on AEM itself prior to the advent of AEM Apps and in AEM Apps proper.  As the name suggests, the library leverages the Ionic framework which is, in our opinion, the current goto platform for Cordova application development.  

Many of the development idioms (patterns, Angular directives, visual affordances, states and routes) exposed by the Ionic framework and its underlying framework AngularJS are translated into AEM components and templates.  By exposing the core Ionic components like ion-content, ion-header-bar, and directives related to the Ionic side menu, the construction of applications using common AEM development techniques is significantly enabled.  Further, by mapping the AEM concept of a page tree to the Angular UI Router concept of States and State Nesting, application authors are freed to author their application as multiple pages, removing burdens which would be presented by authoring an application as a single page while not losing the power and experience of a single page app in the final product.

To get you started developing apps even faster we have released, in tandem with the Ionic AEM Apps Library, a Maven Archetype aimed at producing a multi-module project including the Ionic AEM Apps Library.  Along with deploying the library and providing exemplar templates to jumpstart your development, the archetype sets up the core Content Sync configurations required to build and update your AEM App.

Both of these projects are available now on Github and Maven Central.

Ionic AEM Apps Maven Archetype https://github.com/Citytechinc/aem-apps-ionic-maven-archetype

Ionic AEM Apps Library https://github.com/Citytechinc/ionic-aem-apps