Spartacus, the new storefront from SAP, brings new, modern Progressive Web App technologies into the SAP Commerce
Cloud environment.
Before we dive completely into the Angular & Spartacus world, let’s first look at two basic questions:
- What is a storefront?
- How were storefronts set up before Spartacus?
What is a storefront?
Simply, a storefront is the virtual shop window of an online shop that displays products with their characteristics. In the SAP world, however, a storefront is understood to mean more, it is a kit of predefined components, logics and templates for an online shop. For example, a classic Buiness- 2 - C customer shop can be set up quickly and easily with a B2C storefront.
How were storefronts set up before Spartacus?
Before Spartacus, many SAP Commerce (oder formerly SAP Hybris) shops were set up with the so-called Accelerator
storefront. The accelerator templates use the now outdated, but still widespread, Java Server Pages (JSP)
technology. Accelerator templates (or recipes) contain much more than just JSP code, for example, they provide
predefined data structures including business logic, more or less an online shop out of the box.
What exactly is Spartacus?
Spartacus is the new OpenSource Storefront, which is based on Angular and brings all the advantages
of Progressive Web Apps into the eCommerce world. A Progressive Web App is an application available on the
Internet that comes very close to a native app. This blurs the line between Web & App, as PWAs also have access to
native functions such as push notifications or the camera.
Spartacus consistently relies on modern technologies such as Angular, Node and NPM and runs headless. This means that the frontend is 100% decoupled from the SAP Commerce backend system, and all communication runs through the rest of the endpoints. Of course, there is no Spartacus without SAP Commerce.
What are the advantages of the Spartacus?
A classic accelerator solution didn’t exactly shine with flexibility; Updates, for example, had to be laboriously imported with a lot of manual adjustments. Spartacus is now focusing on flexibility thanks to its detachment from the actual SAP Commerce System, which results in the following advantages, among others:
- easy updating of the Spartacus version (per Dependency-Update in Angular)
- separate deployments of the backend as well as the frontend (Frontend can be further developed, without touching the Backend)
Switching to Spartacus also has direct positive effects for the end user. This means that the PWA can take advantage of its advantages and no longer needs a memory-consuming installation on its mobile device. This is a big advantage especially for occasional users ****, but also active online shoppers are convinced by a more fluid and customer-oriented Look & Feel.
The question ‘Accelerator vs. Spartacus’ can be answered very quickly, as SAP is no longer developing the accelerator storefront and is now relying entirely on the Spartacus concept.
Big picture
Spartacus successfully rounds off the new cloud range from SAP: the online shop no longer consists of on-premise servers
with a huge SAP Commerce installation, which renders JSPs and displays it to the user using a MVC pattern.
Your SAP Commerce online shop is now running in the cloud, relies on new Progressiv Web App technologies and offers
a high degree of flexibility in terms of further development, maintainability and scaling.
We at b-nova will be happy to help you upgrade to the new cloud-enabled SAP Commerce, or advise and support you in developing your online shop.
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