How App Builder helps drive business agility for your commerce platform

How App Builder helps drive business agility for your commerce platform

Businesses are striving to build immersive, easy-to-use ecommerce experiences for their customers. To meet their customers’ heightened expectations, businesses need to build shopping experiences composed of a growing number of services, and often extend the native capabilities provided by these services.

Adobe Commerce has always been one of the most flexible commerce platforms available. With a modular and open architecture, developers have control over every aspect of the application and can customize it to meet their needs. However, as customizations increase, so does the code and number of dependencies that developers need to maintain over time, which can increase the cost of ownership.

As businesses adopt a microservices approach — often with services from multiple vendors — developers must build custom integrations to bring together APIs and data from multiple sources. These integrations are complex to build and maintain, diverting valuable resources from building features and capabilities shoppers need.

Adobe Developer App Builder is a unified extensibility framework for Adobe solutions. App Builder for Adobe Commerce simplifies how developers extend native commerce capabilities. In addition, App Builder makes it easier to integrate with third-party services to build composable shopping experiences.

What does App Builder include?

Benefits of App Builder with Commerce

App Builder is designed to increase the speed of building and deploying new features, while reducing the cost to maintain them. Adobe Commerce has full coverage of its functionality by a variety of APIs. And with the most recent release, Adobe has added support for over 500 events through Adobe I/O events. App Builder allows developers to write microservices that will extend native functionality — using APIs and events — without customizing the Adobe Commerce core code.

Some of the benefits of using Adobe App Builder with Commerce are:

In addition, App Builder includes access to all APIs and services provided by Adobe I/O Runtime — including an event pipeline, developer tools and SDK (software development kits), user interface components, and CI/CD that accelerate development.

Creating and managing a new application

Creating a new application is a very simple process. App Builder can be accessed through the Adobe Developer Console. If you do not have access to App Builder, you can reach out to your account team for access, or you can request trialaccess.

Create application

  1. Create new project from template

Graphical user interface

  1. Choose “App Builder”

Graphical user interface, text, application, email

  1. Configure new application

Graphical user interface, text, application, email

Here you can define a new project title and application name.

You can create multiple workspaces for your development process. You can also add additional workspaces later.

Please also select “Include Runtime with each workspace”.

That’s it! Easy, isn’t it?

Project dashboard

After creating a new project, you can access its dashboard and retrieve all required project information. By clicking on workspaces, you will get workspace specific settings and configuration.

Graphical user interface, application, Teams

Inside of each workspace you can:

Initialize project

Now you’re ready to start developing. For that you first need to install aio-cli tool:

https://github.com/adobe/aio-cli

Next run the following command:

Text

This will lead you through the guided journey of App Builder initialization.

Once completed, you can run.

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That will start your application. You are all set. Your first application is up and running!

Summary

While building new microservices with App Builder is easy, it’s important to think through architectural decisions when determining the correct solution for your needs. Consider the pros and cons of creating and maintaining new services. Consider how each service interacts with and shares data with the rest of your application, and any additional complexity that could be introduced into your system.

App Builder gives developers flexibility in extending Adobe Commerce, and agility to integrate with third-party microservices, or even build new microservices. App Builder takes care of hosting, scaling, securing, and running your apps so you can focus on building what matters — great customer experiences.

If you weren’t able to attend Adobe Summit, you can learn more about App Builder through the on-demand recordings of the sessions and labs.

Oleksandr Lyzun presented an innovative App Builder service he and his team built for Adobe Commerce at Adobe Commerce Rockstar.

Surya Lamech and Nishant Kapoor hosted a session on App Builder and Composable Commerce.

Oleksandr Lyzun is the commerce technical team lead at Comwrap Reply. In the last 14 years of working with Adobe Commerce he developed, led, and deployed numerous projects. As Magento Community Maintainer and Magento Master, he works with passion and love on various Magento Community projects. His passion is to work on complex Adobe projects and provide tailored solutions to the digital challenges of e-commerce customers.

Surya Lamech also contributed to this article. Surya Lamech is a product marketing manager at Adobe

with a focus on platform, scale, and extensibility for Adobe Commerce. Prior to his current role, he was a principal solution architect helping clients design and deploy engaging customer experiences built on Adobe solutions. When he is not in the office, he's either on the soccer field with his boys or out riding his motorcycle.