Beyond Headless Content: Layout as a Service in dotCMS

Expect More Than Content

You should expect more than just content from your REST APIs. With "Layout as a Service", or LaaS-ie (groan), you can get the benefits of a traditional CMS-driven experience with the developer friendliness of CaaS. Layout as a Service makes app/CMS integrations (including previews) extraordinarily straightforward. Scroll down to "The Goods" for example code.

Give it a REST

In the CMS space, RESTful access to content (Content as a Service, CaaS, Headless CMS, etc.) is all the rage. With the rise of modern JavaScript frameworks and Single Page Apps, it is pretty easy to see why. Content as a Service allows the decoupling of the management of content from the presentation of that content and gives developers access to content in a familiar JSON format. This is a huge benefit for developers as they are no longer tied to developing in what they might consider old-fashioned CMS-based page presentations. Developers can develop (read: play) with the latest modern application technologies, Angular, React or whatever and access / inject business managed content into their apps via REST. The good news is that dotCMS has had these REST endpoints for years. Hooray Developers, right?

When Content as a Service Is Not Enough

The problem comes along when business users need to see a whole layout in CONTEXT to manage content effectively, very much like traditional in-context editing, and when users require more control over the layout, order, and presentation of their content than a single CaaS call will allow. In fact, they need to manage something very much like a page made up of different content objects, but it needs to be machine consumable in order to be delivered properly in other applications.

Concrete example: We recently had a customer whose business users were in charge of managing not single content objects, but lists/carousels of different content objects, with specific graphical headers, based on visitor personalization and contextual data — think Netflix movie lists. Business users needed to be able to generate lists and respond in an extremely agile way to fast developing marketplace trends (say the death of a beloved performer) and the business needed to be able to manage and order the lists of the carousels (managing the list of lists) so that they made sense for the visitor. And, insult to injury, the resulting layouts and lists needed to be displayed not as pages, but in apps and set top boxes, some with limited HTML markup capabilities.

Enter Layout as a Service

Layout as a Service (LaaS) takes the best of a CMS-driven experience (easy templating, server-side contextual rendering, workflow, personalization, rule and permission-based content delivery) and marries it with the developer friendliness of Content as a Service. In dotCMS 4.2, you can call any page and receive the full page payload back as a single JSON object, including:

Site/Host/Channel with surrounding metadata

Page details, SEO Keywords, descriptions and canonical URLs

Template details

Content block details — these are a listing of the editable blocks of content that make up a page

Layout details, including header, footer, column and row information for grids

Not only that — and here is the magic — you can tell dotCMS to render the results and return the rendered results as JSON to you so you can use the information to paint your screen as needed, with very little effort.[ Source]-https://dzone.com/articles/beyond-headless-content-layout-as-a-service-in-dot?fromrel=true

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