Extending Adobe Experience Manager using Adobe Developer App Builder

Last update: April 17, 2024

CREATED FOR:

  • Developer

What is App Builder for AEM

The new Adobe Developer App Builder provides an extensibility framework for a developer to easily extend AEM functionalities.

App Builder provides a unified third-party extensibility framework for integrating and creating custom experiences that extend Adobe Experience Manager. With this complete extensibility framework, built on Adobe’s infrastructure, developers can build custom microservices, extend, and integrate Adobe Experience Manager across Adobe solutions and the rest of the IT stack.

App Builder provides a way for customers to easily extend Adobe Experience Manager in various use cases:

  • Middleware Extensibility - Connect external systems with Adobe applications building custom connectors or use a suite of pre-built integrations.
  • Core Services Extensibility - Extend core application capabilities by extending the default behavior with custom features & business logic.
  • User Experience Extensibility - Extend core experience to support business requirements or build customer-specific digital properties, storefronts & back-office apps.

App Builder has been available to enterprise customers and partners by way of Adobe’s Developer Preview since Summer 2020. General availability (GA) of App Builder is scheduled for December 2021. Adobe welcomes developers to try out App Builder through Adobe’s Trial Program.

NOTE
For customers of AEM as a Cloud Service, who want to use App Builder, see Extending Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service using Adobe Developer App Builder.

Architecture

Instead of an out-of-the-box solution, Adobe Developer App Builder provides a common, consistent, standardized development platform for extending Adobe Cloud solutions such as AEM including:

  • Adobe Developer Console — For custom microservice and extension development, letting developers build and manage projects while accessing all the tools and APIs they need to create plugins and integrations.
  • Developer Tools — Open-source tools, SDKs, and libraries to allow developers to easily build custom extensions and integrations. Use React Spectrum (Adobe’s UI toolkit) to have one common UI for all Adobe apps.
  • Services — I/O Runtime for hosting infrastructure on Adobe’s serverless platform, and I/O Events for event-based integrations. Adobe also provides out-of-the-box support for storing data and files.
  • Adobe Experience Cloud — Developers can submit extensions and integrations to be published within their Experience Cloud Org. System admins can then review, manage, and approve these extensions. Once published, your custom App Builder extensions and tools can be found alongside other Adobe Experience Cloud apps.

The following diagram illustrates how a standard application built on App Builder uses these functionalities:

Architecture

For more details about the App Builder architecture, have a look at Architecture Overview.