How To Migrate The Existing HTL or JSP based Websites to AngularJS 6+

[TechnoJargon]

Hello

We have some existing websites which are written using HTL or JSP and currently running in AEM 6.1. In an upcoming project of AEM 6.4 upgrade, we are given additional requirements to migrate the front-end codes to AngularJS. Apparently this means, we have to rewrite the templates/components codes into Transcripts which is a huge development effort. We would also need to incorporate the Angular SPA Editor which is a newbie in the AEM world.

What would be the best way to achieve this sort of functionalities. Given, the HTL and JSP files will remain intact. Is there any way to render the component HTML using Angular ? Kind of an Angular wrapper ?

I have gone through few tutorials for Angular (e.g. the WKND Events etc). However, these tutorials are mentioning about how to build an Angular+AEM component from scratch.

Getting Started with the AEM SPA Editor - Hello World Tutorial

Adobe Experience Manager Help | Getting Started with Angular and AEM SPA Editor

Any suggestions on the approach will be highly appreciated. Note that our new target platform will be AEM 6.4 SP2.

Thanks

[Jörg_Hoh · Accepted solution]

I am not a huge proponent to switch the frontend from classic HTML to SPA just for the sake of using SPA. I don't really see a value in that work.

But besides from that there is nothing special in changing the component implementations. Or do you want to switch to server-side JS/Angular? Because then I am not sure if that's possible at all with 6.4.

[TechnoJargon]

As Joerg mentioned, converting a plain static content website to SPA won't be absolutely necessary. A transactional website would make more sense to work with SPA.

On the long run, a number of integrations might be affected or require additional complexities to work with SPA. SEO might be an example. Although the Angular Universal provides support for SEO, server complexities will increase a lot.

Several package/modules would be also needed to work with AMC especially analytics and target.