Some say they believe they won’t be able to use the knowledge and experience anywhere else in their careers.
Some of them see this move as ‘boxing’ themselves in.
It is generally believed that focusing on the niche product may cause taking a lot of time in the future to get re-trained for a different product or technology if the current market conditions change and SAP Commerce will fade in relevance and popularity. Proprietary platforms come and go, and developers feel afraid to find themselves with useless knowledge and meaningless experience.
Even though I generally share the view and arguments above, I also believe that SAP Commerce is a special case. What I want to leave you, then, is with the explanation of why I think so.
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If you need to create complex behavior from the simulated virtual users in the load test, the built-in capabilities of out-of-the-shelf products may not be sufficient. For example, parsing output formats from an API response to create the formatted inputs for an API request may be difficult for a particular load testing tool, but a quick and easy exercise for a high-level programming language.One of the possible ways is using designated libraries to write our own simple load generator from scratch. For our project, this approach has proven to be a faster and reliable way to address the concurrency issues in the SAP Commerce Cloud custom code. In this article, we explain how to write a load generator from scratch with Python.
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When the coronavirus outbreak happened in China, it boosted local e-commerce as many stuck at their homes forced to buy their goods online. Sales of fresh food on JD.com reportedly jumped 215% during the 10-day period and counting. The ability to serve a large number of customers is growing every year. The traffic may be doubled in a week. How to make sure your system is capable to serve high traffic demand? In today’s article I’m sharing my experience with Tsung, a high-performance testing framework.
The SAP Commerce Cloud APIs are highly customizable, and even smallest changes in configuration, data model or Java code may result in performance degradation. Performance testing is especially important in cases where concurrency may be the source of the problem. To recognize and fix such issues timely, it is recommended to perform regular performance testing, ideally integrated into the build and deployment pipelines. This article is devoted to Apache JMeter, one of the well-known tools for automated (and) performance testing.
Any SAP Commerce Cloud setup is based on a multi-server setup organized as web cluster. This product comes with clustering support out of the box since very early versions. However, many years in a row, it is still one of the most challenging topics.
JGroups is an essential component of SAP Commerce Cloud. It is widely used as an embedded solution for distributed messaging and eventing in the cluster. It is hard to say that it is underdocumented or it has some quirks that nobody knows how to encounter. However, almost every large project stumbles with JGroups. This article is aimed to shed some light on the internals of the SAP Commerce Cloud clustering and JGroups.
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Product data is a core of e-commerce and integral part of the customer experience and customer journey. The well-organized product data drives customer acquisition, sales and eventually results in the increasing lifetime value of a customer.
SAP has recently announced a new SaaS offering, SAP Product Content Hub, a cloud-based solution for product and information management (PIM). The new product relies on the SaaS model only.
In this article, I’m basically just going to give a little bit of an introduction to what SAP Product Content Hub is as well as shed some light on what is under the hood in terms of architecture and customizability. Read More »
What content management system you use is of a much higher importance today than it was years ago. Today’s CMS needs to contend with a multi-device world with a wide variety of tablets, mobiles, laptops, and be architecturally ready for new not-yet-existing channels in the consumer’s universe, such as AR/VR and the Internet of Things.
A CMS typically consists of a frontend part, or a «head», and backend. The headless CMS, as their name says, don’t stick to a single predefined “head”. Theoretically, you can develop your own if it is good for your case. Another name for headless CMS is API-first because this interaction is based on APIs.
For example, the old hybris CMS Cockpit had both parts built with ZK Framework, which orchestrates both the HTML/Javascript “head” and was the essential part of the CMS backend. These parts were tightly connected and intertwined into a single unit called CMS Cockpit. Later, SAP announced Smartedit, which has been a big bet and a quantum leap for Commerce Cloud’s content management. Spartacus, the open-source Javascript storefront from SAP, well complemented Smartedit. I published the comprehensive reviews of both products in the blog earlier.
There are a number of headless content management systems that are mature enough to efficiently replace the built-in Smartedit CMS. Among them, I would highlight Contentful, Prismic, DotCMS, Cloud CMS, Amplience, and Contentstack as well-established and innovative products with a clear roadmap and good integration capabilities.
One of my recent research projects was aimed at using Contentstack as a headless content management system for SAP Commerce Cloud. This article uncovers the key highlights of the research. As a result of that work, I also created a data migration tool for moving existing CMS content from Commerce Cloud to Contentstack.
What is Contentstack? Contentstack is a SaaS headless CMS with an API-first approach that offers the approach known as Content-as-a-Service. It focuses on managing structured content into data feeds that other applications, such as Commerce Cloud, can consume. You can design a content data model interactively or via the Contentstack API and populate the structures with the content interactively or via the same API.
In this article, I pay special attention to the data migration from Commerce Cloud’s CMS to Contentstack. This exercise helped me to see the complexity in all its glory. Because when you design a system from scratch, you can evade the platform’s constraints by designing the structures compatible only with the new CMS. When you need to migrate data, you have to find a solution on how to adapt concepts and data models to get them compatible with Commerce Cloud.
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Payments is a critical part of any e-commerce system. Integrating with a new payment processor is often full of unknowns for developers, and the documentation is either too cumbersome and time-consuming or, on the contrary, scanty and, to the extent it is available, tends to focus only on technical details.
