Jorik Barten
Read all my blogsSpartacus evolves to “Composable storefront”
What started as the project “Spartacus” in early 2017, has now been promoted (since version 5.0) to the official SAP product “SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront”. Besides losing the (in my opinion) cool name, it comes with some great benefits. For example that it’s now included in the SAP Commerce Cloud licence.
For the on-premise customers the old “Spartacus” code is still available as open source and documented in their Github but won’t be maintained anymore. The new Composable Storefront has a roll-forward update policy that means SAP doesn’t commit any bug fixes to old releases anymore.
To get started with the new Composable Storefront it’s good to know that with being released as an official SAP product, it’s also well documented in the SAP Help Portal. And if you need any help, you can reach out to the official SAP support channels as you’re used to.
Composable
In each release there’s more code splitting and libraries for more modules are provided.. A selection of the current available modules includes the Intelligent Selling Services, Store Finder, Account, Profile, ASM and since one of the latest releases the Cart module has been moved to a separate package. For installation information, see Schematics.
When you start using Composable Storefront in your project, you are asked to choose which features you would like to set up. Some of the features are already selected by default, but this is only a suggested setup. You can select and unselect the features that are relevant for your installation.
Benefits for you as a company
- The “old” Accelerator storefront uses templates that are JSP based and tightly coupled with the backend. This requires platform knowledge to adjust and extend out of the box templates and is less upgradable.
Composable Storefront makes usage of one of the most popular frontend frameworks available these days: Angular. This means that every developer that’s familiair with this framework can work with this new storefront without any learning curve. This could benefit your search for new developers. - Composable Storefront is an out of the box PWA (Progressive Web Application). This means your storefront is responsive to the size of your screen and that will save you time to implement this manually.
- It’s also a SPA (Single Page Application), meaning it loads the static content (headers, footers, logo’s) once and will swap the content on the fly. This will save a lot of page loads and provides a much better user experience to your customers. In combination with that the composable storefront is 100% API driven, it causes some really fast web performance. Who doesn’t want that?
Future of Composable Storefront
Like any other modern framework or technique, it’s never finished and there is much more to come. SAP started with the B2C implementations but since the 3.0 release SAP worked hard on the B2B features. At the time of writing this SAP has made the most important features and components, 73% to put a number on it, of all out of the box components from the accelerator available for the Composable Storefront. In the picture below you see what comes next.
Are you interested in the the new Composable Storefront or do you want any information on how to upgrade your old storefront to a modern composable storefront? Feel free to contact Acorel on how we can help you with the (technical) implementation and make it a successful project or get a free demo.