[#4] 5 things: AEM Local Setup

To address the elephant in the room first, “How to get AEM Jar , and why is it so difficult to get one?”

While there are other content management systems and web development tools available that are free and open source, AEM offers advanced features and capabilities that are valuable to many enterprise-level customers and organizations. Therefore,

Adobe has made the decision to keep AEM as a commercial product in order to generate revenue from its sales and to protect the intellectual property and proprietary information that it contains.

To get started with development in AEM, these are the 5 things you need:

1. Executable .jar file & liscence.txt : For this, your organization must be a solution partner with Adobe.
   Or you would need to purchase it from Adobe. ( Which is easier said than done )
2. AEM Welcome Screen: When you first launch a fresh AEM instance, you will be presented with the AEM Welcome Screen. This screen provides you with a quick overview of the AEM interface and key features. You can explore the various options available, such as accessing the touch-optimized UI or the classic UI, or creating a new project.
3. AEM Sites Console: AEM provides a powerful tool called the Sites Console, which allows you to manage the entire lifecycle of your website. From creating a new site to managing templates and pages, the Sites Console is a great place to get started when building your first AEM site. You can check out the tools console as well by clicking the “hammer(tool)” icon on the left navbar in the welcome screen.
4. Familiarity with the application : Just play around with the application for a while ( even if you don’t understand it for now). Look at the different features, OOTB ( out-of-the-box ) things & tools provided.
5. Check out the OOTB website: After the server has started, it should have an already created OOTB website ( We-retail or WKND or Adobe Core Components ). Open it up and explore.

While exploring, you may find something which intrigues you, this is good, as it can help you keep going in this journey to understand that concept.

And, along with it, you may learn about other conecpts on the journey.

For me, it was the workflow console in the tools.