AEM Forms replacement for Watched Folders

[DarrenBiz]

With the inevitable march towards AEM and away from Livecycle, I was wondering if Adobe are planning to replace some of the core functionality that Livecycle provides like Watched Folders? There doesn't seem to be a nice automated way to do this in "pure" AEM Forms without writing your own folder watcher, posting to JCR and using custom Launchers. Watched Folders provides features like throttling and batch sizing and timing that would be quite complex exercise to replace.

Currently we still need the Livecycle / Processing server to watch folders and post content to the JCR where we can use launchers / workflows, but if the Livecycle server is required, I might as well remove AEM from the mix altogether and do it in Livecycle, where it is far less complex to develop.

Is this functionality planned for migration?

[smacdonald2008 · Accepted solution]

I do not think its accurate to think of AEM as a replacement to LC. They both perform different tasks. AEM is about web management and building world class ditigal marketing experiences while LC is a powerful enterprise tool for document services. You can use both together to perform many useful tasks. Now with respect for watched folders in AEM, you can easily write custom services that use JCR events. For example, if an asset is dropped into a jcr folder, you can write a service to respond. We have a community article around jcr events and osgi. See  http://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/using/events.html.

[Kristian_Wright]

From what I've been explained, LC is being migrated into AEM Forms, which is a separate module of AEM.  The only parts that are not (for now) are Process Manager and DRM from my understanding.  The Adobe topology [1] shows that forms processing is done on a Process server which is an Author.  For Process Manager, then you use the ES4 component of AEM Forms.

So are you suggesting that we still use ES4 for all forms processing and bypass the AEM Forms Process server?  I agree with Darren in that AEM Forms is lacking in its ease of implementation of forms processing in comparison to using ES4 directly.

[1] http://helpx.adobe.com/aem-forms/6/aem-forms-architecture-deployment.html