AEM Interview Questions Part 1

When you are preparing for technical interview, it is sometimes beneficial to know what types of questions that may be asked during your interview. I am going to list some questions that may be asked during an AEM interview, and the answers to these questions. This is not a definitive guide by any means, but a way to get going in the right direction.

This is part one of my AEM interview questions. You find the other parts here:

Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5 - Part 6 - Part 7 - Part 8 - PDF

Q: What is AEM?

A: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), is a java based content management system that is offered from Adobe. It was previously called Day CQ5, but was acquired from Adobe in 2010. AEM is based on a content repository and uses the JCR to access the content in the repository. AEM uses the Apache Sling framework to map request url to the corresponding node in the content repository. It also uses the OSGI framework to internally allow modular application development.

Q: What are the advantages of AEM over another CMS?

A: One big advantage of AEM over another CMS is how it integrates with other products from Adobe and with the Adobe Marketing Cloud. AEM comes built in with features like workflows to control content in the CMS, the use of search queries to find anything you are looking for, setting up social collaboration, tagging content, and a way to manage your digital content.

AEM also includes a way to manage mobile applications, mobile websites, e-commerce, and marketing campaign management. 

Q: What is the technology stack that CQ5 is based on?

A: The CQ5 technology stack is based on three technologies. These technologies are: Apache Sling, OSGI (Apache Felix), and the Java Content Repository (JCR).

Apache Sling is a RESTful framework that is used to access a jcr over http protocol. It will then map that request url to the node in the jcr.

OSGI is a framework that is used for modular application development using Java. Each module, which is called a bundle, can be stopped and started independently during runtime.

The Java Content Repository uses the JSR-170 API to access the content repository by using Java independently of the physical implementation. CQ5 uses its own implementation of the jcr called CRX.

Q: What is the role of the dispatcher?

A: The dispatcher is AEM’s caching and/or load balancing tool. By using the dispatcher it can also help protect your AEM server from attack since it will be using cached pages. The goal of the dispatcher is to cache as much content as possible, so it does not need to access the layout engine.

Load balancing is the practice of distributing computational load of the website across several instances of AEM.

The benefits of using the dispatcher as a load balancing tool is so that you gain increased processing power since the dispatcher shares document requests between several instances of AEM, and to have increased fail-safe coverage. This is accomplished by if the dispatcher does not receive responses from an instance, it will automatically relay the request to another instance.

Q: What is sightly?

A: Sightly is an HTML templating language that was introduced in AEM 6.0. It is meant to take the place of JSP files and is the preferred templating system for HTML. The name sightly means “pleasing to the eye”, and its focus is to keep your markup beautiful and maintainable.

I plan to add more interview questions to this blog, so make sure to check back.

I hope you enjoyed this post. Please feel free to post any comments below.