Welcome to Tech Mastery, your expert source for insights into technology and digital strategy. Explore topics like Adobe Experience Manager, AWS, Azure, generative AI, and advanced marketing strategies. Delve into MACH architecture, Jamstack, modern software practices, DevOps, and SEO. Our blog is ideal for tech professionals and enthusiasts eager to stay ahead in digital innovations, from Content Management to Digital Asset Management and beyond.
I was getting "init failed:Error: not supported argument" error while trying to generate the JWT Token with RS256 algorithm through "jsrsasign" npm module.
Most of the time while working on the project we will have scenarios to dynamically register the servlets with different resource types, selector and extension, etc — registering the same servlet with different resource types, selector, extensions, etc.
Let's assume we have a servlet that is registered with a specific resource type but later we have a requirement to enable the same servlet for a different resource type, one of the common options is modifying the source code to enable the additional resource types. The code change might not be the optimal solution in most cases.
In this tutorial, let us see the simple approach to register the servlets dynamically with different resource types, selectors, and extensions.
The OSGi Metatype Annotations(OSGi Declarative Services Annotations) can be used to register the dynamic servlets.
ObjectClassDefinition — Generate a Meta Type Resource using the annotated type
AttributeDefinition — AttributeDefinition information for the annotated method.
Designate — Generate a Designate element in the Meta Type Resource for an ObjectClassDefinition using the annotated Declarative Services component.
I am creating a servlet with the name DynamicResourceTypeServlet, Created a @ObjectClassDefinition inside the servlet with required AttributeDefinitons with servlet registration
properties
@ObjectClassDefinition(name = "DynamicResourceTypeServlet", description = "Resource Types to Enable this Servlet")
The bnd-maven-plugin generate the required OSGi meta-type definitions for the annotations during compile time. The dynamic servlet registration is a useful feature that helps to register the servlets dynamically with different resource types, selectors, and extensions.
Cloud Manager is a Cloud service that allows customers to build, test, and deploy AEM applications hosted by Adobe Managed Services.
Enables customers to manage their custom code deployments on their AEM-managed cloud environments with manageable pipeline automation and complete flexibility for their deployment timing or frequency.
Each customer gets its own Git Repository and their code is secure and not shared with any other Organizations.
Cloud Manager is only available to Adobe Managed Services customers using AEM 6.4 or above
Restructure the code with the latest arch type to support the Dispatcher deployment
Address the quality issues and adhere to the best practices for onboarding into Cloud Manager
Enables customers to easily access and manage the cloud environment and CI/CD pipeline for their Experience Manager applications.
Helps to define application-specific KPI's like peak page views per minute and expected response time for a page load,
Helps to define Roles and permissions for different team members.
CI/CD pipeline:
Setup optimized CI/CD pipeline to speed the delivery of custom code or updates such as adding new components on the website.
Allows AEM project teams to quickly, safely, and consistently deploy code to all AEM environments hosted in AMS
A thorough code scan is executed to ensure that only high-quality applications pass through to the production environment.
Quality checks include, code inspection, security testing, and performance testing are always performed as part of the CI/CD pipeline execution
Flexible Deployment Modes:
Cloud Manager offers customers flexible and configurable deployment modes so they can deliver experiences according to changing business demands
In automatic trigger mode, the code is automatically deployed to an environment based on specific events such as code commit.
You can also schedule code deployments during specified time frames, even outside business hours.
Manual – trigger the deployment manually
Auto Scaling:
Cloud Manager detects the need for additional capacity when the production environment is subject to unusually high load and automatically brings additional capacity online via autoscaling feature.
The autoscaling feature will apply only to the Dispatcher/Publish tier, and will always be executed using a horizontal scaling method, with a minimum of one additional segment of a Dispatcher/Publish pair, and up to a maximum of ten segments.
Cloud Manager Benefits:
Enables organizations to self-manage Experience Manager in the cloud
Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery of code to reduce time to market from months/weeks to days/hours
Cloud Manager provides continuous delivery and continuous integration for updates with zero downtime.
Code Inspection, performance testing, and security validation based on best practices before pushing to production to minimize production disruptions.
Automatic, scheduled or manual deployment even outside of business hours for maximum flexibility and control.
Autoscaling feature intelligently detects the need for increased capacity and automatically brings online additional Dispatcher/Publish segment(s).
Reduce the dependency with Adobe CSE for production deployment
Configure a set of content paths which will either be invalidated or flushed from the AEM Dispatcher cache for publish instances
Development on your local git repositories ate integrate with CM Git repository
API/Events/Webhooks for external tool integration through Adobe I/O
CI/CD Pipeline:
Define a set of deployment steps which are executed in sequence, the Cloud manager provides the below two major pipelines
Non-Prod Pipeline
Production Pipeline
Two types of Non-Prod pipeline
Code Quality Pipeline
Deployment Pipeline
Non-Prod - Code Quality Pipeline
Code Quality pipelines execute a series of steps on a code from a Git branch to build and be evaluated against Cloud Manager’s code quality scan
Helps to identify and fix the quality issues before planning for production deployment.
Code quality pipeline can be used before provisioning the environments
Quality report for review
Non-Prod - Deployment Pipeline
Deployment pipelines support the automated deployment of code from the Git repository to any Non-production environment, meaning any provisioned AEM environment that is not Stage or Production.
Production Pipeline
The CI/CD Production Pipeline is used to build and deploy code through Stage to the Production environment, decreasing time to value.
Build Triggers:
manually,
with a Git commit
based on a recurring schedule
The Production Deployment:
Application for Approval (if enabled)
Schedule Production Deployment (if enabled)
CSE Support (if enabled)
Cloud Manager Quality:
Quality checks including code inspection, performance testing, and security validation are conducted as part of the pipeline.
Code quality testing:
Cloud Manager uses SonarQube and OakPAL Content Rules to statically analyze the code and the content. It tests security, reliability, maintainability, coverage, skipped unit tests, open issues, and duplicated lines of code. Unfortunately, there is no way to add your custom rule, but you can mark some of the detected issues as false-positives.
Security testing:
Cloud Manager runs the existing AEM Security Heath Checks on stage following the deployment and reports the status through the UI. The results are aggregated from all AEM instances in the environment. If any of the Instances report a failure for a given health check, the entire Environment fails that health check.
Performance testing:
It tests both: page rendering and asset performance. After 30 minutes, it provides a report outlining i.e., CPU utilization, Disk IO Wait Time, and Page Error Rate.
For each of the above mentioned Quality Gates, Adobe introduced the concept of the three-tier result:
Critical – these are issues identified by the gate which cause an immediate failure of the pipeline
Important – these are issues identified by the gate which cause the pipeline to enter a paused state. A deployment manager, project manager, or business owner can either override the issues, in which case the pipeline proceeds or they can accept the issues, in which case the pipeline stops with a failure
Info – these are issues identified by the gate which are provided purely for informational purposes and have no impact on the pipeline execution.
The performance and security testing are minimal you should execute some external performance and security tests if required.
Cloud Manager Roles
Business Owner - Primary user who completes the initial Cloud Manager setup. Responsible for defining KPIs, approving production deployments, and overriding important 3-tier failures.
Program Manager - Uses Cloud Manager to perform team setup, review status, and view KPIs. May approve important 3-tier failures.
Deployment Manager - Manages the deployment operations. Uses Cloud Manager to execute stage and production deployments. May approve important 3-tier failures. Has access to Git repository.
Cloud Manager API
The Cloud Manager API enables Cloud Manager customers to interact with the same underlying capabilities exposed through the web UI in a fully programmatic fashion
This allows for the integration of the Cloud Manager Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipeline with other systems.
The API’s are managed through Adobe I/O
By using Adobe I/O Events, Cloud Manager can send external applications notifications when key events occur
Sample Use Cases
Starting the Cloud Manager CI/CD pipeline from an external system.
Executing additional tests between the standard Cloud Manager performance tests and the ultimate production deployment.
Triggering additional activities after the pipeline execution is complete or a specific step has been completed, for example
CDN cache invalidation once the production deployment is finished.
Deploying related applications to non-managed Services systems.
Notifying on other channels (e.g. Slack, Microsoft Teams).
Creating issue reports in bug tracking systems (e.g. Atlassian JIRA) on pipeline failures
Cloud Manager allows the user to receive notifications when the production pipeline starts and completes (successfully or unsuccessfully), at the start of a production deployment, as well as when the Go-Live Approval and Scheduled steps are reached.
The notifications appear in a sidebar in Cloud Manager UI
Email Notifications:
By default, notifications are available in the web user interface across Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. Individual users can also opt for these notifications to be sent through email, either on an immediate or digest basis.
External Tool Notification:
Notifying on other channels (e.g. Slack, Microsoft Teams) though CM API and Events
Cloud Manager Environment Flow
Environment specific Cloud Manager Git branches for non-stage and prod environments i.e. Dev and UAT
Non-Prod Deployment pipeline for non-stage and prod environments i.e. Dev and UAT
Production pipeline for stage and Prod deployment through master branch
The development will happen in the customer-specific git repository and merged with the Cloud Manager git repository whenever required.
Cloud Manager now supports building customer projects with both Java 8 and Java 11. By default, projects are built using Java 8. Customers who intend to use Java 11 in their projects can do so using the Apache Maven Toolchains plugin.
You can build the End to End CI/CD pipeline with your local git repository and if required external Ci?CD tools e.g. Jenkins and the CM APIs.
Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. It does so by adding additional behavior to the existing code (an advice) without modifying the code itself, instead separately specifying which code is modified via a “pointcut” specification, such as “log all function calls when the function’s name begins with ‘set’”. This allows behaviors that are not central to the business logic (such as logging) to be added to a program without cluttering the code, core to the functionality.
Aspect-Oriented Programming provides a solution to implement Cross-Cutting Concerns. Implement the cross-cutting concern as an aspect. Define pointcuts to indicate where the aspect has to be applied.
This ensures that the cross-cutting concerns are defined in a centralized component and can be applied as needed.
This enables some of the below benefits
Reusable code
Cleaner code
Write less code
Less boilerplate code
Easy to maintain
Let us quickly see some of the definitions
Advice — Define what needs to be applied and when
Jointpoint — Where the Advice is applied
Pointcut — a combination of different Jointpoints where the advice needs to be applied.
Aspect — applying the advice at the pointcuts
Types of Advice:
Before Advice — the advice runs before the method execution
After Advice — the advice runs after the method execution
After Returning Advice — the advice runs after the method executes successfully
Around Advice — the advice can run before and after the method execution
Throws Advice — ensures the advice runs if the method throws an exception
AspectJ
AspectJ is an aspect-oriented extension to the Java programming language. AspectJ AOP implementation provides many annotations to support AOP programming in Java.
@Aspect — declares the class as an aspect.
@Pointcut — declares the pointcut expression.
The annotations used to create advices are given below:
@Before declares the before advice. It is applied before calling the actual method.
@After declares the after advice.
@AfterReturning declares the after returning advice.
@Around declares the around advice.
@AfterThrowing declares the throws advice.
AspectJ offers different required dependencies in the Maven Central repository under group org.aspectj.
AspectJ with AEM
Let us now see how to enable the AspectJ with AEM
As a first step enables the below plugin in core module pom.xml(the plugins and dependency versions are added based on Java 1.8, change based on your Java version )
<plugin>
<groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
<artifactId>aspectj-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>1.11</version>
<configuration>
<complianceLevel>1.8</complianceLevel>
<source>1.8</source>
<target>1.8</target>
<encoding>UTF-8</encoding>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<goals>
<goal>compile</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
Enable the AspectJ dependencies to the Core module Pom.xml
Embed the AspectJ runtime dependency to Core bundle — enable the below configuration changes to core module pom.xml
<plugin>
<groupId>biz.aQute.bnd</groupId>
<artifactId>bnd-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>bnd-process</id>
<goals>
<goal>bnd-process</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<bnd><![CDATA[
Import-Package: javax.annotation;version=0.0.0,*
-includeresource: aspectjrt-1.8.13.jar;lib:=true
]]></bnd>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
Now define the Aspect — the aspect is going to execute After, Before, and Around advice.
execution(* com.aspectj.core.servlets.*.doGet(..)) — Defines the PointCut, the advice will be run for the doGet method on the servlets under com.aspectj.core.servlets package
The first wildcard — matches any return value
com.aspectj.core.servlets.*.doGet — doGet method on the servlets under com.aspectj.core.servlets package
(…) — any number of parameters (zero or more)
logExecutionTime — Around advice, log the method execution time for all Servlet “GET” requests
logRequestHeader — Before advice, log the HTTP request headers for all Servlet “GET ”requests. Mapping the input variable req(the variable should be defined in the same order as the actual method signature) for using inside the Advice , args(req,…) — req as a first parameter followed by zero or more parameter
addCustomHeader — Before advice, add custom HTTP headers for all Servlet “GET ”responses. Mapping the input variable resp(the variable should be defined in the same order as the actual method signature) for using inside the Advice, args(…,resp) — resp as the last parameter
Now while invoking the servlets under com.aspectj.core.servlets through the “GET” method, the logExecutionTime, logRequestHeader and addCustomHeader Advice run and perform the appropriate operations.
The AOP will help us to address the cross-cut concerns in Java e.g. logging in all methods, this helps us to write clean code with better maintainability. The common concerns across the project can be maintained separately as an Advice and executed runtime based on the PointCut configuration.
max-age=<expire-time> — The time, in seconds, that the browser should remember that a site is only to be accessed using HTTPS.
includeSubDomains — If this parameter is specified, this rule applies to all of the site’s subdomains as well.
preload — this parameterindicates that the site is present on a global list of HTTPS-only sites
This would inform the visiting web browser that the current site (including subdomains) is HTTPS-only and the browser should access it over HTTPS for the next 2 years(63072000 seconds).
Before implementing this header, you must ensure all your website pages (including sub-domain pages) are accessible over HTTPS else they will be blocked by the browser.
The header should be enabled from the webserver(Dispatcher), to enable the header in Apache, use mod_header module and set the header as below in the virtual host file
Header always set Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains;preload"
X-Frame-Options
The X-Frame-Options HTTP response header can be used to indicate whether or not a browser should be allowed to render a page in a <frame>, <iframe>, <embed>, or <object>. Sites can use this to avoid click-jacking attacks, by ensuring that their content is not embedded into other sites.
X-Frame-Options: DENY X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
DENY — The page cannot be displayed in a frame, regardless of the site attempting to do so.
SAMEORIGIN The page can only be displayed in a frame on the same origin as the page itself.
The header should be enabled from the webserver(Dispatcher), to enable the header in Apache, use mod_header module and set the header as below in the virtual host file
Header always append X-Frame-Options SAMEORIGIN
The Content-Security-Policy(CSP) HTTP header has a frame-ancestors directive which overrides X-Frame-Options in modern browsers.
Refer to the below video for more details on X-Frame-Options and CSP frame-ancestors.
Content Security Policy (CSP)
Content-Security-Policy is the name of an HTTP response header that modern browsers use to enhance the security of the document. The Content-Security-Policy header allows you to restrict how resources such as JavaScript, CSS, or pretty much anything that the browser loads.
Content Security Policy (CSP) is an added layer of security that helps to detect and mitigate certain types of attacks, including Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and data injection attacks.
The header should be enabled from the webserver(Dispatcher), to enable the header in Apache, use mod_header module and set the header as below in the virtual host file
allows only the webpages from the current domain to iframe this page
Refer to the below URL for more details on CSP
X-Content-Type-Options
The X-Content-Type-Options header prevents “MIME sniffing” which is really a feature in Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. It allows the browser to scan or “sniff” the content and respond away from what the header may instruct.
The X-Content-Type-Options headers instruct browsers to set the content type as instructed(ensure you’ve set the content types correctly) and never detect the type of their own.
The header should be enabled from the webserver(Dispatcher), to enable the header in Apache, use mod_header module and set the header as below in the virtual host file
Header always set X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
Feature-Policy
Feature Policy HTTP Security Header tells the modern browsers which browser features are allowed or denied. Feature Policy allows web developers to selectively enable, disable, and modify the behavior of certain APIs and web features in the browser. Feature Policy allows you to control which origins can use which features, both in the top-level page and in embedded frames.
The header should be enabled from the webserver(Dispatcher), to enable the header in Apache, use mod_header module and set the header as below in the virtual host file
Disable the geolocation and camera API’s for all the contexts
Header always set Feature-Policy "geolocation 'none'; camera 'none'"
Enable the geolocation and camera API’s only for the pages from the current domain and the pages from myexample1.com
Header always set Feature-Policy "geolocation 'self' https://myexample1.com; camera 'self' https://myexample1.com"
Refer to the below URL for more details on Feature-Policy
These are some of the critical HTTP security headers that can be enabled to protect the AEM platform from security attacks.