A note from 2026: This article was published in 2018. It references SAP Hybris 6.7, which is long out of maintenance; the product is now SAP Commerce Cloud, and many Accelerator/JSP AddOn patterns are legacy compared with SAP Composable Storefront and current OCC/Commerce APIs.

Out-of-the-box SAP Commerce hybris extensions are great examples of how to customize the platform, delivered directly from SAP. They can be used as an implementation reference and, with some exceptions, can be considered a vendor-recommended best-practice approach.

The extensions come in source code form, with comments and documentation. It is a good starting point for finding a solution: the way SAP recommends in its packaged extensions is likely better than anything else, because you never know what side effects you may face if you go with an experimental solution. After all, why reinvent the wheel? Of course, there are exceptions: not everything is perfect. However, it is important to understand the exceptions too.

Learning by example and designing by example have a lot in common. You can use this approach to upskill junior developers and perfect your own expertise. For me personally, there is no other way to learn solution architecture than by studying the experience of others.

While I was examining the extensions, I was taking notes. These notes became the basis for this series of articles. I split the notes into batches and will publish them as separate blog posts, one per batch. Later, I’m going to combine the blog posts together and create an index to make navigation easier.

The extensions are in alphabetical order, because their purpose is not very important for this exercise, and grouping them by topic won’t help much. I am focusing on which patterns were used in the code rather than how business logic is implemented across the extensions.

There are 505 extensions in hybris 6.7, about 15,000 Java classes, and 7,000 XML files. Of course, it is a huge amount of work to inspect all extensions and categorize the underlying logic in them. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. So let’s start!

AcceleratorCMS

The acceleratorcms extension provides a number of WCMS components that are designed to be used with your generated storefronts.

Inspecting the code of this extension, you will learn:

AcceleratorFacades

A facade is an abstraction layer that provides a simplified interface to the underlying implementation, AcceleratorServices.

AcceleratorServices

AcceleratorStorefrontCommons

The acceleratorstorefrontcommons AddOn is a special type of AddOn that encapsulates the common web resources for a storefront. This allows you, for example, to reuse web code that is common to the different Accelerators, such as B2B and Telco.

AcceleratorWebServicesAddon

The acceleratorwebservicesaddon is the AddOn that extends the Omni Commerce Connect (OCC) API. Its function is to provide resources which depend on the SAP Hybris Commerce Accelerator.

AccountSummaryAddon

The Account Summary AddOn for the B2B Commerce Accelerator allows users to view their company’s financial history through the B2B site.

AdaptiveSearch