Integrating Apache Wookie with AEM

Interactive websites - term making a lot of buzz over world wide web. 

But what are Interactive websites ?

Interactive websites are the ones which provides a number of different features to make interactive experience for users. One of the most important qualities of a website is interactivity. It allows users to interact with the website. With change of time web visitors expect to interact meaningfully with websites. 
There interactive aspects of a website often include : 

• responsive forms
• chat applications
• games
• or some sort of mini applications

Though creating any such feature is not a rocket science but it does comes with some development time associated with each feature. And creating such site in AEM would also cost time as there are no such features provided in AEM 'out of the box'. 

What if we have a central server where we can have such mini applications and use them directly in AEM ? 

Where users can select from a wide variety of interactive mini applications like chat-applications, geolocation sharing apps, a to-do list or a game and many such ready to use mini applications. 

Integrating Apache wookie with AEM allows users to drag & drop such interactive application. We have developed a connector tool for connecting AEM with apache wookie : AEM-WookieConnector 

Apache wookie is Java server application with allows you to upload & deploy widgets (mini web applications) for your applications. Using AEM-Wookie Connector tool AEM users can use simply drag n drop wookie widgets on their AEM pages and use from any where. 

Here are the steps to install AEM-WookieConnector Tool : 

Install Wookie as a standalone jar or as a WAR version from instructions given here

Next, Clone the AEM Wookie connector 

Build and Deploy :
   mvn clean install -PautoInstallPackage

Configure and provide the Wookie server URL and API Key

And Start Using !

AEM Wookie connector tool was presented as a solution to wider audience at a annually organized event AEMHub 

Other useful links :

• Presentation : HTML & Slideshare 
• GitHub repository : https://github.com/ankit-gubrani/AEM-WookieConnector

Creating custom Content Finder tab in AEM

AEM provides a quick and easy way to find & use content while editing a page via Content Finder. Content Finder is a way to search different types of assets stored in AEM and make them available for drag N drop on the pages. 

Creating a custom tab in Content finder makes it easier for user locate content or drag N dropable data. While creating a connector tool for AEM I came across this use case where I had to provide custom tab in the content finder to make data available for user while editing the page. 

Creating custom tab is a 2 step process : 

• Creating a back-end service for providing data.
• Creating custom content finder step.

1. Back-end service : It provides the data to the custom content finder tab to display. For this post I have created a text file with JSON data, in real world scenario it would be a service providing dynamic data.

2. Creating custom content finder step : 

• Create a folder with jcr:primaryType as sling:folder under /apps/wcm/extensions hierarchy with name contentfinder.
• Set property extensionGroup as tabs on "contentfinder" folder.
• Set property extensionType as "contentfinder_extension" on contentfinder folder.

• Now create a JS file under contentfinder folder.  

Above code creates a new content finder tab with name mentioned as tabTip property, setting the ranking as 1 makes this tab to appear on #1 position in the content finder, iconCls property sets the class on the tab and displays the icon on the tab. The most important part is creating a result box using CQ.wcm.ContentFinderTab.getResultsBoxConfig to display the result fetched from URL mentioned. 
After creating a similar JS file there will be new tab added in the content finder as shown here :  

Here is the link to github repository : 
https://github.com/ankit-gubrani/Codebrains