OnPurpose Studio has recently launched our first Adobe Experience Manager package, which uses AEM's Translation Integration Framework to synchronize translatable content to Crowdin.
The process between the decision to explore AEM to getting AEM running on my local machine was shockingly obtuse. This post is intended to be the high-level guide I wish I had.
Before digging in, here are some spoilers:
This is a bureaucratic process, not a technical one. You will have to submit tickets. You will have to wait for responses. You will have to wait for provisioning. Expect this process to take more than a week.
No, it's not free. You must pay money before getting access to Adobe's sandbox environments.
Goal: Download the AEM SDK
Let's start with the end in mind. You want a local download of the Adobe Experience Manager SDK. This is a Java jar file that will be the backend and frontend service.
This post won't go into AEM's architecture - I am far from an expert - for now just understand you're looking to download a jar file.
Silver Technical Partnership
In order to download the SDK for local development, you must be a Silver Technical Partner. You can be a Community Technical Partner for free, however Silver is required to access Adobe's Sandboxes.
There will be back-and-forth with this process. They will ask for details about you and your company. They asked us for our LLC paperwork, our EIN, and other pieces of info.
Adobe Software Distribution
Once your Silver Technical Partnership is approved - and you've waited 3-5 business days for propagation - you should have access to Adobe's Software Distribution site.
Specifically, you want the AEM as a Cloud Service tab within your Software Distribution account.
Almost There
If you've download the jar file, you're basically there. The final step is to understand that the same jar file is used to boot the backend (author) service and the frontend (publish) service.
To boot the author service:
java -Xmx2048m -jar /path/to/aem-sdk-quickstart.jar -r dev
To boot the publish service:
java -Xmx2048m -jar /path/to/aem-sdk-quickstart.jar -r dev -r publish
It's working! Wait... is it working?
Yes, it is. But the boot process takes a lloonngg time. Seriously, more than 5 minutes on first boot. The author service boots to localhost:4502 and it will show a 404 until booting is complete.
If you see this screen, it means you have successfully slogged through the process of booting AEM locally. Congrats! You should be able to login with admin/admin from this point.
More to Learn
This was just the first step. Our lessons in integrating Crowdin with Adobe Experience Manager could be its own series of blog posts.
If your company is using AEM, we'd love to meet you! And if you want to use Crowdin to translate your content in Adobe Experience Manager we encourage you to check out our AEM Sync app on the Crowdin Store.