Solving AEM DevOps Challenges, Part 3: Slow Development Cycles

In this series, we’ll discuss several challenges that we see in the ecosystem that we wanted to correct and how AEM Cloud does it. Our first article discussed Inconsistent Environments and our second article covered Relevant Content for Testing and Validation. This article will talk about the challenge of Slow Development Cycles.

For AEM developers, a critical task is keeping their versioned files in sync with the JCR. The conventional way of doing this is to build from the filesystem to the JCR or in some cases export a package from the JCR and extract the XML files out of the package into their versioned repository. Waiting for build times or doing repetitive mundane tasks like exporting packages has a drastic effect on developer efficiency and leads to increased costs. While there are many partial solutions to this challenge with AEM development, every AEM developer faces consistent frustration with keeping their projects in sync.

We addressed this through our own AEM Cloud Sync Tool — which not only syncs the JCR with changes made in the filesystem but also gives the developer the capability of syncing changes from CRXDE Lite. This includes building complex JCR node structures, copying from libs, and adjusting JCR node properties. Many other sync tools need manual intervention and only allow one way syncing. The AEM Cloud Sync Tool allows for two way automated syncing with no build times or package exports and ensures your filesystem always contains your latest changes, ready to version in git.

Want to learn more?