Headless Development for AEM 6.5 Sites headless-development
Learn how AEM 6.5’s powerful headless capabilities like Content Models, Content Fragments, and the GraphQL API work together to enable you to manage your experiences centrally and serve them across channels.
Overview overview
Headless implementation is increasingly becoming important for delivering experiences to your audience is, wherever they are and regardless of channel.
Headless implementation forgoes page and component management as is traditional in full stack and hybrid solutions and focuses on the creation of channel-neutral, reusable fragments of content and their cross-channel delivery. It is a modern and dynamic development pattern for implementing web experiences.
Comparing Headful and Headless headful-headless
This document focuses on the full headless implementation model of AEM. However, headful versus headless does not need to be a binary choice in AEM. Headless features can be used to manage and deliver your content to a variety of endpoints while also enabling your content authors to edit single page applications. All in AEM.
AEM 6.5 and Headless aem-headless
AEM 6.5 is a flexible tool for the headless implementation model by offering three powerful services:
-
Content Models
- Content Models are structured representation of content.
- These are defined by information architects in the AEM Content Fragment Model editor.
- Content Models serve as a basis for Content Fragments.
-
Content Fragments
- Content Fragments are instantiations of content models.
- These are created by content authors using the AEM Content Fragment editor.
- They are stored in AEM Assets and managed in Assets Admin UI.
-
Content API for delivery
- The AEM GraphQL API supports Content Fragment delivery.
- The AEM Assets REST API supports Content Fragment CRUD operations.
- Direct content delivery is also possible with the Content Fragment Core Component’s JSON export.
Your First Steps with AEM Headless first-steps
There are several resources available for your to get started with AEM’s headless features. They are intended for different use cases, but all give a solid overview of AEM’s headless features.