Adobe Franklin is a brand-new technology that introduces a radical new concept of a serverless, microservices architecture to near-instantly publish content partnered with a couple of not-so-new practices of using Google Drive or Microsoft SharePoint as a headless CMS and GitHub as a live code repository.

Next-Gen Composability – or AEM Franklin as it is known – believes in unshackling authors from the burden of slow and complex user interfaces. They allow authors to create and publish content in seconds using tools they know and love, such as Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Designed for ease of use, speed, and scalability, Next-Gen Composability streamlines the process of publishing content to the web, removing burdensome CMS interfaces. Teams are free from investing developer resources to learn and maintain a complex framework stack. Launching a site using Next-Gen Composability requires just standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Here are a few of its notable advantages:

• Publish content directly to the web in seconds using tools you already know and love.
  Teams can create and edit content in authoring tool of choice, like Microsoft Word/Excel, Google Docs/Sheets, and more authoring environments in the future. Next-Gen Composability can even integrate into your browser so you can preview and publish pages as you continue editing in a fluid and agile authoring experience.
• Enjoy direct collaboration and version control, leveraging built-in functionality of Office365 and Google Suite products. No more copy-pasting from one system into another.
• Simplify your digital asset management. Next-Gen Composability can work without a standalone digital asset manager (DAM). Assets can be embedded directly or referenced by URL when a DAM solution such as AEM Assets is available.
• Speed up web development. Focusing on well-known web standards and forgoing complex frameworks, Next-Gen Composability offers an extensive, style able block collection.
• Built for peak web performance. Next-Gen Composability implementations mandate a Google Lighthouse score of 100 on live pages by running a performance audit on each code change.
• Deploy in a matter of seconds, with an extremely low learning curve and straightforward tools that minimize development time and streamline the path to going live.
• Forms - Another exciting feature of Adobe Franklin is the ability to create forms using Excel.

Comparison between AEM Sites and Franklin

• Blocks vs Components - The intention of Adobe Franklin's blocks is to be lightweight and very quick to create. This is largely because they are purely frontend: just some JavaScript and CSS. As we know from years of AEM Sites development, AEM Sites components are full-stack. The HTL is rendered server-side and often backed by a Sling model. Component dialog code is server-side too.
• Integration to Adobe Cloud technologies – All we need is a cloud service configuration for AEM sites and we are good to go. With Franklin – not yet readily available but might be in the future. For now – this looks like a custom implementation.
• Time to Market - There are two aspects of time to market to consider here:

1. Initial time to market or how long it takes you to get your first page out of the door.
2. Net new time to market or how long it takes you to get content out the door once you're already "live".

For the prior, Franklin stands out – because of the full-stack development time necessary for AEM Sites up front. Franklin is absolutely going to get our content out the door faster.

For the latter, however, it really is not that straightforward. Once a site’s component library is built, getting new content out the door can be just as fast with AEM Sites. It's simply all about how much process and governance you put over top of the publication process and this applies to both Franklin and Sites.

• Feature comparison between AEM Sites and Franklin:
• Targeting mode
• Launches
• Multisite management
• Seamless integrations to the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud
• The side rail with asset and product (via CIF) authoring
• The suite of AEM and AEM CIF core components.
• Experience Fragments (fragment block is not the same)
• Content fragments, their models, and the Content Fragments Console in AEMaaCS

Conclusion
It does look like Franklin is going to change the game a bit; it's a slick technology that has great promise.

If we're looking to build out a large, enterprise site, might be better off to stick with AEM Sites but for use cases that deal with microsites, blogs and smaller marketing-focused properties, Franklin is definitely worth looking into.

From rapid foundational website creation to marketing automation and more, we can help you get greater ROI from your Adobe technology investments.