A Deeeeeep Dive into Sling Models, plus News, Events, and more

There are several Solution Partner events this week that might be of interest: on Tuesday you can learn about technical documentation, Wednesday there is a Technical Sales workshop and learn about Sinch's Mobile Engagement Platform, and Thursday with Experience Makers Live we learn about Customer Experience Management (CXM) at scale.

Featured this week is a deep dive into Sling Models. We've got articles covering the what, why, and how of Sling Models, a 6-part series to guide you through the fundamentals up to advanced usage, and then some tools and libraries that will simplify the process and the developer experience.

As always our goal is to help you stay on top of the vast amount of information and resources available within the Adobe Experience Ecosystem through our curated content and timely updates. If you'd like to see a specific topic covered, or have suggestions for other sources you'd like to see us cover, please comment below and let us know. Leave us a comment and let us know what you think :)

Events this Week

Does your Experience Strategy include your self-service channels? - with Tony Rems

27 October | 12:00-1:00 | Register

Learn from Hero Digital how companies are addressing their large, complex, and expanding technical documentation. Whether you are a native SaaS organization or a leader in your field with a unique software capability, you would take away a few main learnings:

Assess if your current experience and CMS strategy supports technical documentation
Address your different channel needs (like self-service and white list partners) for content syndication
How to apply a new taxonomy and tagging structure for structured content
How to leverage your assessment in Adobe Experience Manager with content and experience fragments

Technical Sales Workshop for Adobe Experience Platform

28 October | 9:00-2:00 | Solutions Partner only | Registration closed

This workshop will focus on the Adobe Experience Platform's technological value to customers. You will learn:

Deeper and broader knowledge of Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and how it provides value to your clients
How an Adobe Solution Consultant (SC) delivers an AEP sales pitch and demo to a prospective customer
How to effectively demo AEP features and value relevant to a use case using an IdeaCloud demo from the Adobe Demo Hub
How to script and deliver a presentation to address a customer’s goals and challenges, and tailored to suit an audience

Help Brands Achieve Tangible Business Results with Sinch's Mobile Engagement Platform - with Michael Ricci & Barry Snower

28 October | 8:00-9:00 | Solutions Partner only | Register

Mobile marketing is more important than ever – consumers expect to be reached in various channels. Sinch is a new global Accelerator partner to Adobe in the Channel ECO-system Experience Cloud. With their Mobile Engagement Platform, they collaborate with Adobe Solution Partners to realize Enterprise Mobile Strategies.

The Experience Makers: 3 Simple steps to delivering CRO value (and winning friends) - with Carlos Vicente, Craig Taylor, & Patrick Douwsma

29 October | 10:00-10:45 | Register

Get inspiration from stories 'from the field’ and insights of people who are at the forefront of the digital transformation within their company. Joined by experts for an update on the latest digital innovations how to deliver Customer Experience Management (CXM) at scale. Register now to get a look behind the scenes and the possibility to ask questions.

News, Tools, & Tutorials

Adobe Max Sessions

Missed Adobe Max? Or want to catch a session you couldn't see while attending another? Now all of the sessions from Adobe Max are available on-demand. Check out the keynote presentation, or perhaps Mastering the Essentials of XD might peak your interest. With more than 500 sessions to choose from, there's sure to be something for you.

Adobe, Microsoft and C3 AI team up to help companies effectively manage customer experiences at scale

"Today’s consumers and business buyers are more demanding than ever before. They expect companies to know them intimately. And they expect brands to provide contextually relevant information and offers based on their needs at that moment. To help organizations that are digitally transforming today at an accelerated pace, we are announcing a new joint offering between Adobe, Microsoft, and C3 AI, which promises to transform sales, marketing, and customer experience through an AI-powered platform that is built on an industry vertical model."

AEM OpenCloud on AWS

Amazon AWS in collaboration with Shine Solutions Group has released an open-source infrastructure platform for running AEM on AWS and a Quick Start deployment guide. The Quick Start deploys an Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) OpenCloud architecture on the AWS Cloud with high-availability features, which includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and Amazon CloudFront.

Adding a Color Picker to the AEM Content Fragment Model Editor

Suraj Kamdi | Perficient Blog

Content Fragment Models are built with elements from various out-of-the-box data types, but sometimes a client requires some customization. In this step-by-step tutorial we are shown how to extend the functionality of the Content Fragment Model to set the Color Picker data type by overlaying the Content Fragment form builder resource. Find the code package here

Adobe Experience Manager: Enable Gated Content in AEM

Albin Issac

Gated or Premium Content is highly valuable to marketers because it can be a powerful tool for lead generation and revenue. This tutorial demonstrates how to enable gated content through two methods - Closed User Groups and content behind a lead form. Find the code here

Feature: Deeeeeep Dive into Sling Models

Sling models are at the core of AEM Core Components and should be the foundation for custom components as well. This week's feature provides in-depth understanding of Sling Models, how they work, why you should use them, and then some great tools that will make using them painless if not outright enjoyable.

Our first article gives us an overview of why AEM components should always use Sling Models even if it might be easier not do so. Adobe's recommendations and following best practices alone should be enough to convince even the most jaded developer, but the host of other benefits covered will be sure to persuade.

After you've gotten your feet wet with some of the why behind using Sling Models with your AEM components, get ready for the deep end. This six! part series starts with creating an interface for a model and how we can use just one view and interface, but have multiple models to output different content. Next we learn how to properly annotate your Sling Models and best practices to keep your code clean, secure and performant.

Follow up with learning how to let Sling do the heavy lifting for you by leveraging the proxy object created by Sling when you move your annotations from your model to your implementation. I told you this was a deeeep dive, and this section has it's own Part 1 and Part 2 on building a simple component and a complex component using this method.

Next up we'll learn how to use Sling to render our own custom resources by using a SyntheticResource with an example for some common use-cases. And finally, we learn about customizing Core Components by using the Sling delegation pattern.

Now often one reason Sling Models aren't used is because it's sometimes considered 'more work'. But have no fear, as we've got a few tools and libraries to make the job easier and more efficient. We've got a quick tutorial on using Project Lombok with your Sling Models to automatically generate your getters and setters. And then we've got a great tool in the AEM Component Generator, which if you haven't seen, prepare to be impressed. Especially as work on version 2.0 is almost finished with a whole new user-interface to make the process even simpler.