Welcome to the AEM 6.5 Engineering Academy
Who this page is for
| Audience | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|
| React/UI engineers new to AEM | Your primary on-ramp — everything maps AEM concepts to React equivalents |
| Backend engineers new to AEM | Same journey, skim the frontend-mapping asides |
| Tech leads | Use the structure to plan team onboarding |
What this academy is
A fully generic, reusable knowledge base for engineers learning Adobe Experience Manager 6.5. Nothing here is proprietary: no internal templates, no production Java, no client code. Every worked example uses one fictional page — the PHI gold-tier hospital cover plan page — a product detail page for a made-up health insurer, so the same example carries you from content modelling all the way to dispatcher caching.
How the academy is organised
| Area | What it contains | When to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Start Here | Orientation, mental models, environment setup, glossary | Your first week |
| Core Learning Journey | 9 sessions + 9 paired labs, in order | Weeks 1–4, work through sequentially |
| Developer Reference | 7 sub-sections of deep-dive reference material | While building — look things up as needed |
| Enterprise Engineering | Architecture, deployment, content ops, integrations, operations | When your work touches platform concerns |
| Security & Governance | Security model, hardening, compliance | Before any release |
| Troubleshooting Hub | Symptom-first diagnostic guides | When something breaks |
| Code Reference | Copy-paste snippets and console admin quick bites | Daily |
The one mental model to internalise first
AEM is a content-centric, server-rendered platform. If React apps are "UI as a function of state", AEM pages are "HTML as a function of content". The four load-bearing mappings:
| AEM concept | React-world equivalent | One-line intuition |
|---|---|---|
| JCR (content repository) | A persistent Redux store | One big tree of state, addressable by path |
| Sling Models | Custom hooks | Adapt raw state into a clean, typed API for the view |
| HTL templates | Server-side JSX | Declarative markup over a model, no logic in the view |
| Dispatcher | Nginx + CDN | Cache-first delivery in front of the app servers |
Where to begin
- Read The AEM-to-React mental model — 15 minutes, highest value page in the academy.
- Set up a local instance via Environment setup.
- Start Session 1 of the Core Learning Journey.
Complexity such as capacity planning, Oak clustering and edge-compute is deliberately kept out of the core sessions — you will find it flagged as electives inside Enterprise Engineering.