Build single page applications using AngularJS on AEM

© 2015 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Build single page applications using AngularJS on AEM
David Benge | Lead Computer Scientist

What Is a Single Page Application?
wikipedia:
“A single-page application (SPA), is a web application or web site that
fits on a single web page with the goal of providing a more fluid user
experience akin to a desktop application. In a SPA, either all necessary
code – HTML, JavaScript, and CSS – is retrieved with a single page
load, or the appropriate resources are dynamically loaded and added to
the page as necessary, usually in response to user actions. The page
does not reload at any point in the process, nor does control transfer to
another page”
2

Single Page Application Pro’s and Con’s
Pro’s
 Use of page fragments or partials speeds up
the loading of secondary pages
 Better mobile device experience
 Reduced number of resource requests across
the network greatly speeds up the applications
page transitions
 Lack of full page refresh creates a more app
like smoothness leading to a richer user
experience
3
Con’s
 Has Search Engine Optimization issues due to
the fact that pages/views rendering is driven
via javascript.
 Components and some core libs rely on the
document Ready event to initialize
 Speed of the initial load can be slow
 Not social sharing friendly. Twitter and
Facebook and others have issues when users
try to share SPA pages.

The Technical Reasons Are Great But Why Did I really Choose To Do An SPA?
4
• The debate on my development team between web and native has
become a religious war. It was time to see if we could get the experience
we want on the mobile experience without building a native application.
• Mobile applications have their place, but I believe a well built site can
convey the same information.
• Informational mobile apps without shared web content create data silos
that make discoverability and interoperability difficult.
• Responsive is a nice start but we wanted to take it further. We are also
experimenting with a concept we call ReDaptive. Watch our GitHub and
YouTube channels for more information in the future on this concept.

 Must have native application like smoothness on everything from the
high resolution desktop to the smartphone.
 Search and social friendly
 Works with AEM authoring
 Our development pattern needed to be easy to follow and understand
 No JSP; all Sightly
 Semantic html markup. Each page should be useable as a data
record based on markup
 Javascript needed to be balanced with markup. Avoid 500 js library
include madness
5

© 2015 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential. 6
Our Proof Of Concept
Combine sling with Angular

• Custom base page component that allows pages to be either an Angular application
entry point or rendered as a view partial
• Angular JS code to control the application/site and its view navigation
• Rewrite rule to help handle search engines by adding a selector
• Based on runmode Base Page includes content or an Angular ui-view element
• Responsive design
• Custom video component that makes use of Adobe Dynamic Media and native HTML5
video tag markup. Selects best rendition to use based on the video element size and
browser device group detected
• Use of BrowseCap for device detection
• Nearly all Sightly
• Use of Less for style
• Adobe Analytics for metrics
• Uses AdobeAtAdobe boiler plate project - Available in our GIT repo
• Creative Cloud Extract used to build site from XD comps
• Photoshop used to develop the comps
• Adobe Edge inspect used to debug on devices

High Level Technical Overview Of The Base Page Component
 We created a standard page component that inherits from
wcm/foundation/components/page.
 This new base page component has a content.html include in the center. This is where
our page views get loaded. We change the markup based on if the request was made on
a publish or author environment.
 If the request was on author we do a standard content include.
 If it’s a page request on publish we don’t do the include and just insert the div with the
angular ui-view
<div class="page-content" ui-view data-sly-test="${teamsitePage.isPublisher && !teamsitePage.isSearchEngine}"></div>
<div data-sly-include="content.html" class="page-content" data-sly-test="${!teamsitePage.isPublisher ||
teamsitePage.isSearchEngine}"></div>
 In the base component we also include some meta data. We use this to tell angular and
other components how to behave based on the environment.
<meta name="publisher" content="${teamsitePage.isPublisher}"/>
<meta name="wcmmode" content="${teamsitePage.metaWcmMode}">
8

High Level Technical Overview Of The Standard Page Component
 All the pages inherit from the
base page
 Each new page component
includes their markup in a file
named content.html
 If needed they can include a
controller like in this example
 The controller code is stored in a
client lib under the page
component
9
<div class="contact-block" ng-controller="ContactController">
<div class="hi"><span>Hi. </span>How can we help you?</div>
<div class="methods">
<div class="method">
<div class="title">Technology Questions</div>
<div class="phone">+1 613 857 9233</div>
<div class="email">adobe@adobe.com</div>
</div>
<div class="title">Work with Us</div>
</div>
<div class="title">Everything Else</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>

High Level Technical Overview Of The Base Page Component Partial Selector
 Under the base page component we have a file named partial.html.
This file handles any request for a page that has the partial selection
appended to it. This file simply includes content.html with No header,
No footer, No navigation, just the meaty center of the view in our case.
 The partial also includes new metatags with data to replace the
header meta data. The new tags are prefixed with partial for example
partial:title. Its contents will replace the header metatag’s content for
title. The replacement of the metadata is handled by the Angular
application.
<meta name="partial:keywords" content="${head.keywords}" id="partialKeywords"/>
10

High Level Technical Overview Of The Base Page Component Partial Selector
We need to tell Angular about the site hierarchy because Angular will be
handling navigation from view to view. Angular controls the view
loading on the client side via a library called router.ui so it needs to
know how map urls to view partials.
Under the base page component we have a file named routes.json.jsp.
This file provides us a endpoint for Angular’s ui.router to use to load the
router and state provider on the fly on the first page load. One thing we
do alter on the routes is the value of the templateUrl returned from our
routes.json.jsp. On our page path we include a partial selector. Thanks
to the magic that is sling when we make that request now we will get
just the center conent of the page when we navigate from view to view.
11

High Level Technical Overview Of The Base Page Component Angular Router
12
Example output from our routes.json.jsp file is
shown to the left.
This is an example of how we are rewriting out our
routes and re-writing the templateUrl to include the
.partial selector.
Example /content/teamsite/work.html
becomes
/content/teamsite/work.partial.html
When the application/site is loaded in the browser
any link or navigation to a url for example
/content/teamsite/work/cmo.html is handled by the
$location service. It will resolve the url to the
templateUrl which is set to
/content/teamsite/work/cmo.partial.html.
The request to
/content/teamsite/work/cmo.partial.html will be
returned as just the center of the view and injected
into the existing page.

So Far This Is What It Looks Like On The AEM Page Component Side
13

High Technical Overview Of The Proof Of Concept – Component Conclusion
So that’s it for the AEM side of the application. Once the base component pattern was
established it was easy to work with.
Its all fairly normal AEM component and page development from that point on. With a few
exceptions for stock components that make heavy use of the document ready event.
Summary
 In author runmode, it will do full page refreshes
 Search engine friendly due to the fact there is a full page request
 On social shares of a page, the path exists
 In publish run mode, the client side will do partial page refresh
Thanks to the magic of sling resolution we are able to serve full pages or partials as
needed. Every path can be an entry point to our SPA base application.
14

The Angular Bits

The Angular Js bits we used to round out this solution are:
 Controller – Controllers ended up being minimally used at the page
level. Router.ui – used to load and control the routes. We also use the
routing events to load page meta data
 Service – We have a service that helps with pulling and setting meta
data on the page
 Directives – We have a few to provide functionality
 Custom html5 video player directive
 Explore page directive to help with the scrolling and other ui bits on
the explore page
 Angular Carousel which drives the image carousels
16

Whats Next?
17
• We will be adding more functionality to the proof of concept
site
• We are really liking directives and plan to do more work in that
area and investigate using polymer
• Clean up of the header libs to remove some of the
dependency on document ready event

Code is located in out Github repo https://github.com/AdobeAtAdobe
Live site can be found at http://www.adobeatadobe.com
Twitter @AdobeAtAdobe
Video sessions on this proof of concept will be posted on
our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/AdobeAtAdobe

Build single page applications using AngularJS on AEM

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