Thursday, 14th of July. Shopware United, alongside iO Technology , hosted an audience of international developers, architects, thought leaders, etc. for an afternoon of sharing our knowledge about PWAs in commerce.
Filip Krejčí of Storefront X shared his company’s journey in building a Vue.js PWA solution for Adobe Commerce. He discussed their experiments on performance, developer experience and user experience. They shared how Storefront X implements a performance budget for each new feature and bug fix to stay on top of the game. Although Storefront X currently is developed as closed source software, Filip shared a scoop with us. They’re planning to go open source this summer. Exciting times!
Next up was Jamie Maria Schouren of Deity who shared with us the journey of monolithic commerce software (having one solution providing you with everything in a single package) towards more composable commerce (having different software packages to form a more tailored solution). She explained to us how Deity’s PWA product fulfils the front-end and mobile aspect of that last approach. Spoken like a true PWA developer, she shared with us the disadvantages of native apps compared to PWAs in commerce. Examples are having to maintain multiple codebases in different languages or uncertain and longer deployment times. Conclusion: PWAs should be the default solution for commerce platforms’ frontends.
Last, but not least, Bavo Janss, Developer Advocate and Software Architect Commerce at iO, wanted to show us that PWAs, headless and MACH are terms that are only the tip of the iceberg for large commerce implementations. So Bavo took us down the rabbit hole of composable commerce, a strategy where you tailor a solution to the client’s needs by choosing and combining multiple software solutions and/or vendors together. He introduced us to the concept of implementing middlewares between services. Rather than choosing for direct integrations into external platforms, built or adapt a middleware layer where you can control the data flow between the services and optimize it for your client’s needs.
After the talks, whilst enjoying a meal of delicious Persian food (shoutout to Saffraan), the knowledge sharing did not stop. People held intense and very insightful discussions. When would you choose for which solution? When would you consider proposing a composable commerce solution and to what extend can composable commerce be implemented? How does the content of the talks compare to the experience of one another? For some they might seem absurd, for others maybe the next step in one’s company strategy.
Special thanks to iO Technology and Maarten Van Hoof for co-hosting this event.
Want to attend the next meetup – keep an eye out for Shopware United Events or iO Campus meetup
Interested in what was discussed? You can rewatch the entire meetup on our YouTube channel