Over the years, I’ve built a lot of AEM front-end customizations. These solutions leveraged node overlays, dialog tweaks, Coral UI and Granite UI to get the job done. They worked well but rarely felt future-proof. Customizations were loosely tied to product versions, which meant upgrades could break things. Adobe’s UI Extensibility framework changes that. It introduces a cleaner, more isolated model that works well with AEM as a Cloud Service and takes advantage of modern industry standards.

Core Components are recommended as a best practice in AEM. They are intended to speed up development time and reduce maintenance costs. In this post I demonstrate how it's possible to customize and extend the Java Script client library associated with the Core Image component in order to retain the selected Dynamic Media Image Preset and improve the authoring experience. 

In this post, I provide an overview of the UI.Frontend module in AEM, describe my thoughts on why frontend developers will love it, and step through how to get started by adding the UI.Frontend module to an existing AEM multi-module project.