AEM Technology Stack

AEM Architecture

AEM Architecture consist of three major layers

Apache Sling RESTful Application Framework
RESTful application framework responsible for HTTP request processing based on Apache Sling.
OSGi Application Runtime
Fully OSGi Java based modern modular application stack is dynamic library management implementation of Apache Felix.
Java Content Repository (JCR)
Java Content Repository (JCR) persistence layer with Access Control, Versioning, Search Observation etc. Implementation of Apache Jackrabbit Oak, is various persistence options supported such as TAR files, MongoDB, Relational Database and S3.

All these running in Servlet Container or Java EE Application Server.

Key Principles

100% Java
AEM is 100% Java based, supports only “Long Term Support” (LTS) releases. Java 9 and 10 are non-LTS releases by Oracle. Adobe will only provide support for LTS releases of Java to run AEM in production. Therefore Java 11 is the recommended version to use with AEM 6.5.

AEM can be deployed in standalone mode it includes an integrated Jetty web server or as a web application WAR file within third party application server such as JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere etc.

It is platform independent can be installed on both Windows and Linux.
Base on Standards
It is based on standards
JSR-283 –Java Content Repository (JCR) –for content storage
OSGI –Dynamic Module System for Java
Servlet API 3.
Open Source
AEM is commercial product based open source technology, all frameworks that laid in fundamental are open source such as Apache Jackrabbit Oak, Apache Felix, Apache Sling and Apache Tika.