Running AEM alongside other apps

[jakej40603950]

There's a requirement to serve some of the pages of a website from AEM (with apache / dispatcher in the front) and some of the pages from a legacy app (with a non-AEM server stack and a non-apache web server in the front).

What would you say is the best way to achieve this?

I know one of the ways is to probably use sub-domains / directories and have virtual hosts set up on apache for AEM and non AEM sections of the site and forward requests meant for the non-AEM pages to the other server. Will this work since one of the virtual hosts is a different server altogether?

Any other approaches that has been tried by others here and that may be more optimal?

Any inputs are highly appreciated. And since this can be a common use case it may help others with the same requirement too.

Thanks in advance.

[Jörg_Hoh · Accepted solution]

Hi,

If you want to blend 2 independent applications into a single website, and each application should render their stuff on their own without too much integration, that can be as complex as you want 🙂

First of all, having everything reachable below a single namespace should not be to hard. As you mentioned, setup a virtualhost and partition it with <Location> statements; then inside the location you can use mod_proxy (or the AEM dispatcher module) to forward requests to these locations to the appropriate system. That's the easy part.

Next is a consistent site navigation. You need to be able to navigate from a page of app1 to a page delivered by app2. And vice versa. So both applications need to be able to create links to the other application, which requires each application to export the relevant information to be used by the other application. Not to mention sitemap, shared design and functionality, deployment alignments, ...

There's a lot you probably need to consider.

Jörg