StreamX at adaptTo() 2024: day-by-day recap from Berlin

The 14th edition of adaptTo() 2024 conference once again proved why it's Europe's leading conference for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) developers. Held in Berlin's Kulturbrauerei from October 21st to 23rd, it brought together 200 participants from 23 countries across 3 continents.

With AEM Edge Delivery Services (EDS) the most popular agenda topic this year, the conference offered exactly what we came for: deep insights into this newest Adobe technology, which we see as a key solution to be used together with StreamX.

Our team— Marta Cukierman, Kamil Chociej, and Michał Cukierman —was there to explore AEM Edge Delivery's full potential. Here's our recap of what went down during these three intensive days.

The conference kicked off with comprehensive sessions on running the AEM EDS projects. We particularly enjoyed Roxana Balasoiu and Jean-Christophe Kautzmann's insights into developing for AEM Authoring with EDS. Markus Haack and Anian Weber's session on using GitHub for large-scale EDS projects offered valuable perspectives on the organizational side of this work.

Adhutosh Shroti and Satya Deep Maheshwari gave a presentation on incorporating AEM Assets into document-based authoring. The session on auditing sites for broken links by Alina-Mirela Rublea and Damian Zehnder left the audience with some useful strategies addressing these issues in an AEM project.

Natalia Angulo Herrera and Julian Sedding's session on improving the developer experience for AEM Cloud Service. Then, Ekrem Dogan and Francisco Chicharro Sanz followed with a presentation on content and UX experiments with EDS, which hinted at an exciting potential Adobe Summit announcement.

Lastly, Barry d'Hoine and Koen Kicken carried out a great session with practical insights on application testing best practices and project setup, highlighting the importance of building solid testing frameworks in an AEM practice.

A standout moment in day 2 was the panel discussion on AEM Edge Delivery Services. Roman Müller facilitated a conversation with Stefan Seifert, Markus Haack, Lars Trieloff, and Anian Weber. 

The discussion confirmed that EDS has been built on a very opinionated approach that ruthlessly prioritizes the page performance. EDS also leverages the power of familiarity that content authors have with document editors like Google Docs or Word, and this is very much appreciated when content editors are invited into the committee making a decision on a CMS solution.

We also had two IBMiX team's presentations. First, the session on using WatsonX for marketing by Matija Kovaček and Luka Miroić showcased how this Generative AI tool could seriously improve efficiency and performance for marketing teams. It's clear WatsonX has the potential to become a major asset in marketing workflows and is definitely worth exploring if you're thinking about leveraging AI for real-world results.

The second IBMiX talk, by Roland Gruber, covered a granular permissions management tool that can handle permissions at an extremely detailed level, allowing for even quite exotic use cases to be fully accommodated.

The final day brought more practical knowledge and future developments. Adobe's Sagar Miglani and Ashok Kumar gave an overview of the upcoming Java 17 upgrade for AEM 6.5. They talked about feature consistency, upgrade options, tools and the process itself; they also announced the AEM 6.5 and Java 17 beta program opening in December - go to our technical recap for more details on that.

Then Georg Henzler from Cognizant Netcentric went on with the session on migrating massive datasets to AEM Assets and an overview of using Dynamic Media with OpenAPI. While the initial scope was expected to involve 40TB of assets, the final tally ended up being 28TB—still an enormous task by any measure.

We found great value in the sessions on Minimal Sling and its support for EDS by Karl Pauls, Carsten Ziegeler, and David Bosschaert, as well as Robert Munteanu's presentation on OAuth and OIDC support for Sling. Barry d'Hoine and Roy Teeuwen's session on observability in AEMaaCS with OpenTelemetry provided valuable insights into telemetry data gathering and system instrumentation.

Then Tomasz Sobczyk and Oskar Jerzyk from VML Enterprise Solutions presented a solution they used in a client project that involved using AWS CloudFront, S3, and serverless functions to pre-generate and deliver static content, effectively treating AEM as a pure content source. This approach allowed for high performance and scalability without overloading AEM, and the event-driven architecture enabled rapid deployments, scalability, and easy rollbacks.

Stefan Seifert also gave a presentation on using Dynamic Media with OpenAPI, highlighting the advantages of using the wcm.ioMedia Handler over standard Core Components. This presentation focused on the versatility of media handling, support for custom cropping formats, and ease of integration offered by the wcm.io Media Handler.

Barry d'Hoine and Roy Teeuwen's final session on Observability in AEMaaCS with OpenTelemetry provided valuable insights into telemetry data gathering and system instrumentation.

The conference ended with an energetic 60-minute Lightning Talk session, featuring:

• Roman Müller's "AEM meets Enterprise AI"

• Konrad Windszus's "AEM Encryption at Build Time"

• Tad Reeves on "Enabling Localization & AEM Assets Integration with Edge Delivery Document Authoring"

• Krystian Panek's "First-ever IaaC Providers for AEM (Terraform & Pulumi)"

• Vlad Băilescu's "OpenAPI Launches for Content Fragments"

• Stefan Seifert on "(Not) Implementing Custom AEM Components for Edge Delivery Services / Crosswalk"

We're already looking forward to the 2025 edition. And speaking of StreamX at adaptTo() - It's really fun to see our growing presence at this crucial industry event.

Last year, Marta presented on why digital experience platforms should move away from CMS-centric architectures, while Michał, our co-founder and lead architect, ran a playground session showcasing the early stages of StreamX (then known as WebSight DXP). Watch the talk recording below:

And definitely watch the adaptTo() website for videos from the conference once they are available.