Hyvä Edge

Adobe Experience Cloud is the overall name for the suite of products Adobe offers around digital content, marketing, analytics, customer experience and commerce, which incorporates Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Commerce and more.

Adobe Experience Manager, commonly referred to as AEM, is an enterprise-grade content management system (CMS) and digital asset management solution that allows for the creation of content for multiple platforms (including websites) and is part of the Adobe Experience Cloud. There are multiple ways to publish AEM content, one of which is via Edge Delivery Services. Common ways to create and manage content in AEM include the Universal Editor and Document Based Authoring.

Adobe Experience Platform is the name given to the data side of Adobe Experience Cloud, which incorporates many products focused on analytics, customer journeys and customer profiles (segments).

API Mesh is Adobe’s API orchestration tool that allows connecting App Builder applications to Adobe Commerce and Adobe Experience Manager instances, along with external (third-party) services, to allow for integrating and combining data sources from all. API Mesh uses GraphQL, a query language for building APIs, to manage and combine requests.

App Builder is Adobe’s extensibility framework, that currently supports Adobe Commerce and Adobe Experience Manager. In the context of Adobe Commerce, it is billed as an alternative to building extensions directly as part of the main PHP monolithic application, but rather as individual microservices (separate applications) that are hosted on Adobe’s infrastructure. App Builder uses API Mesh to transfer data to and from Adobe Commerce and external services and can also hook into events in the Adobe Commerce application (e.g. order placement).

Commerce Dropins, or dropin components, are Adobe’s new JavaScript-based components for integrating Commerce content within any website/application, a key use case being within Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) content areas. They can be considered as micro-applications that are self-contained. With Hyvä Edge, Commerce Dropins are not utilised, as Hyvä Enterprise powers the commerce content. At the time of writing, only product dropins are available. Cart, checkout, user account and user authentication (login) dropins are in development, and other features, such as B2B, are not yet confirmed.

Document Based Authoring is an alternative way to create, manage, preview and publish content with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and is currently the only way (at the time of writing) to publish and deliver content via Edge Delivery Services. As the name suggests, Document Based Authoring allows for content management via either Google Drive or Microsoft Sharepoint, with a word processor (Docs/Word) being used for content pages/blocks and spreadsheets (Sheets/Excel) for configuration purposes, along with document filenames and folder structure being used to create URL paths.

Edge Delivery Services is Adobe’s new service for managing, previewing, publishing and delivering Adobe Experience Manager content via their globally distributed network, with a focus on page speed performance. It is also commonly used to refer to the entire suite of tools for delivering storefronts, which includes Adobe Experience Manager, Document Based Authoring and Commerce Dropins, even though it is actually just one part of the overall solution.

Franklin, Helix and Composability are all previous, early working titles, for what is now known as Edge Delivery Services and Document Based Authoring.

The Universal Editor is the main WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that ships with Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), providing a visual, in-context interface for creating and managing content. At the time of writing, the Universal Editor is not compatible with Edge Delivery Services (at least for Adobe Commerce), and Document Based Authoring is the alternative supported approach.

Adobe Commerce is the name given to what used to be known as Magento Commerce, and before that, Magento Enterprise Edition, incorporating the main monolithic PHP application that is built on top of Magento Open Source, and includes an optional B2B suite. In addition, Adobe Commerce also encompasses many other commerce services that Adobe provides via SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings. This includes Catalog Services, Adobe Sensei (Live Search & Product Recommendations) and integrations with the Adobe Experience Platform.

Magento Commerce was the previous name of Adobe Commerce before Adobe acquired the Magento platform and the successor to Magento Enterprise Edition (EE). It also offered the optional B2B suite but did not have the additional SaaS services that Adobe now provides.

Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) was the original name of Magento’s enterprise-grade offering prior to being rebranded as Magento Commerce, and then Adobe Commerce. Like Magento Commerce, at this time the product did not offer the additional SaaS services Adobe now provides.

Magento Open Source is the free (and open source, hence the name) monolithic PHP application that Adobe Commerce (and its predecessors Magento Commerce and Magento Enterprise Edition (EE)) are built on top of (extend). It provides the majority of the key commerce features such as the catalog (categories/products) search, cart, checkout, CMS (pages/blocks/Page Builder) and many more.

Magento Community Edition (CE) was the original name of Magento’s free and open source offering, now known as Magento Open Source.

Luma is the default frontend theme that Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce ship with out of the box. While Luma is actually just a reference theme, the term ‘Luma’ is now also commonly used to refer to the default frontend architecture of Magento. Luma (the architecture) is currently deprecated, which means it receives no new architectural advancements. Despite this, it is still the main storefront offering provided by Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce.

PWA Studio is a Progressive Web Application (hence PWA) storefront that was created as the successor to Luma, but has since been deprecated itself, given Edge Delivery Services based architecture (with AEM content and Commerce Dropins) is now its further successor. PWA Studio is built using React (a JavaScript framework) as a SPA (Single Page Application) and is decoupled from the main Magento Open Source (or Adobe Commerce) application, which is often referred to as ‘headless’. At the time of writing, PWA Studio only has partial storefront coverage for Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce (areas such as B2B are not fully implemented).