Adobe announces new innovations for developers to extend Adobe Experience Cloud applications
In today’s fast-moving digital-first economy, every type of company is evolving to adapt new digital tools and emphasize customer experience. This rapid evolution powers innovation across companies of all sizes and requires constant iteration and improvement to maintain.
An enormous challenge companies face in the race to innovate is working with a hybrid mix of infrastructure and applications, whether on-premises or in the cloud, often integrating legacy and modern systems at the same time. This can put strain on developers, who have become revenue drivers for businesses as more companies use them strategically to meet ever shifting customer needs.
As a result, developers are under pressure to reduce time to market, and increase efficiencies amidst a constantly changing environment. At the same time, they are dealing with limited toolsets and inefficiencies, with average time to make a first API call taking between 2-5 hours.
Adobe aims to meet the evolving needs of developers and empower them to succeed with a complete framework to extend and integrate Adobe’s customer experience management applications in Adobe Experience Cloud with the new Adobe Developer App Builder which will reduce the time it takes to create apps from days to 15-30 minutes, as observed in past Adobe hackathons.
Available for Adobe Experience Manager starting in December 2021 and coming soon for Adobe Commerce and Adobe Sign, App Builder helps customers work within their existing infrastructure to build integrations and custom applications that work seamlessly with Adobe products. Developers can start playing with App Builder immediately through our Trial Program. With a modern, cloud-native technology stack, App Builder provides a set of tools and services to extend Adobe Experience Manager, powerhouse combo for content and digital asset management, to customers’ existing infrastructure and apply unique parameters to make the UI look and feel unique for their organizations.
With a growing focus on collaboration as distributed teams work to deliver innovations on tighter timelines, developers seek a robust set of tools and the flexibility to customize those tools to be successful. Adobe is putting the focus on developers to help them save time and build more efficient applications with extensibility across User Experience, Core Services, and Middleware.
- User Experience Extensibility gives developers control over the look and feel of everything an end user would touch across many areas of a business — for example, custom sales dashboards or a user interface for visualizing data import and presentation. Developers can also build specific digital properties, storefronts and back-office apps with the user experience that makes the most sense for each unique business.
- Core Services Extensibility helps developers enhance default behavior within Experience Manager workflows with custom features and business logic, such as workflow customization and extensions.
- Middleware Extensibility lets a company tie Experience Manager into existing backend systems, connecting external enterprise systems through custom connectors or leveraging a suite of pre-built integrations. This allows App Builder to serve as a connecting framework that developers can build on top of to further enhance their application performance and behavior.
Modern Cloud-Native Stack
To power the advanced capabilities of App Builder, Adobe is employing an open source and serverless approach. This modularity offers extreme flexibility with a set of cloud services that can easily be swapped out depending on a customer’s needs. In addition, key features like developer tooling via a command line interface to build, test and deploy apps, a SDK with pre-built libraries that integrate easily with Adobe solutions, backend connectivity, and other capabilities help streamline workflows and create efficiencies for developers.
Beta users of App Builder have benefited from time-savings, ease of use, and more:
- Anil Vasant Umachig, Solutions Architect, Accent Group: “Up until now, we’ve been using custom tools and sometimes building systems based on various technologies, and made them available locally in a machine or on a server. A platform like App Builder changes a lot of this for data teams. It’s a fantastic framework. It helps you build custom, cloud-native Adobe apps, and more importantly it helps you create microservices across various functions and tasks for our business stakeholders.”
- Conrad Wöltge, former CTO, NetCentric: “We can’t wait to see what’s next for App Builder and we’re looking forward to using this stack in many of our Adobe projects.”
- Urs Boller, Digital Analytics Consultant, Raiffeisen Schweiz: “We’re already looking at new ways we can use App Builder to build custom apps and workflows for our other Adobe products. The sky’s the limit!”
For developers, App Builder offers all the functionality of a cutting-edge cloud-native approach, reducing overhead for business customers, making integrations easier, and delivering significant time-savings. With App Builder, Adobe developers can use Adobe’s SDK to integrate Adobe applications quickly and easily.
To try App Builder, developers can sign up for the trial program here.
Other benefits include:
- Developer Tooling - seamlessly works with UX Modeling Tools, IDE Plugins, Command Line Interfaces, and other tools to aid in debugging, testing, and deploying custom experiences
- Pre-Built Libraries - integrate with different Adobe solutions with SDKs, starting with the integration of Experience Manager into Adobe Analytics to return data more efficiently to the application
- Spectrum UI Framework - creates experiences that feel native alongside Adobe products
- Cloud Services - offers a range of services for running, managing, triggering, and optimizing custom digital experiences
To learn more, visit the Adobe Experience Manager Experience League page for App Builder here:
Additional Experience Manager innovations at Developers Live
Consumers today expect information in real-time, and as a result, brands are challenged with pushing out more content and experiences across more channels than ever before. While having to work in close coordination with IT teams to develop these experiences have historically made it cumbersome for marketing teams to deliver timely content, Adobe is launching new quick site creation features for Experience Manager Sites, which will allow marketers to design experiences — such as microsites or campaign pages - all in a matter of days. And by taking advantage of a templated approach to bring new experiences to life, marketers can also complete the process end-to-end with no coding or back-end development, freeing up IT and developers’ time to address other business priorities. For more information about the quick site creation features with Experience Manager Sites, check out this blog post.
Additional Resources:
- Adobe I/O-Powered AEMaaCS Assets Export Implemented in Real-Time or Batch Mode
- Power Personalized Experiences with Adobe Developer App Builder