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Introduction to App Builder

Last update: Fri Feb 21 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

CREATED FOR:

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Developer

Historically, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce development has used in-process extensibility. The in-process model requires any new code to be compatible with upgrades, the server’s PHP version, and many other essential server applications and services that Commerce uses. ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer App Builder uses out-of-process extensibility to avoid these compatibility issues.

App Builder for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce app-builder

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Transcript
In our digital-first world, every e-commerce business needs agility, power, and simplicity on its side. But because e-commerce development is so dependent on integrations and customizations, it’s been hard for teams like yours to be agile and streamlined. To customize, modify, and extend your e-commerce platform, you might spend weeks connecting to a range of services, provisioning storage, securing a hosting platform, managing security, and testing for traffic volume. After listening to the needs of the developer community, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ is thrilled to introduce ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer App Builder for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, our extensibility platform that enables developers to extend commerce without modifying any core application code. Not only does this reduce complexity, it also lowers the cost to maintain your solution. The App Builder platform is event-driven, cloud-native, and serverless. It’s included with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, which means you can focus on building apps in a low-code environment, while letting App Builder automatically manage all the backend provisions, like infrastructure, scaling, storage, security, and access control. And using API Mesh, an API orchestration layer within App Builder, you can easily compose and extend multiple APIs into a single graph. This API Mesh works with APIs from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ and third-party products. When you first try App Builder, you’ll see how fast and simple it is. Just create a new project, add your configurations, publish your app. It just works! What could have previously taken weeks can now be done in minutes. Extend, integrate, and build, all without the overhead of provisioning, scaling, or upgrading. Discover how simple it can be to build and deploy an ecommerce app for your organization. Try App Builder for Commerce today!

ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer App Builder is a serverless extensibility platform for integrating and creating custom experiences to extend ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ solutions, and it’s now available for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. With App Builder, you can build secure and scalable apps that extend Commerce-native functionality and integrate with third-party solutions. As a developer, you can now take advantage of out-of-process extensibility with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce and that in turn provides immediate and long-term benefits.

App Builder provides a unified third-party extensibility framework for integrating and creating custom applications that extend ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. Since this extensibility framework is built on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s infrastructure, developers can build custom microservices, and extend and integrate ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce across other ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ solutions and third-party integrations.

App Builder provides a way for customers to extend ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce in various use cases:

  • middleware extensibility - Connect external systems with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ applications by building custom connectors or take advantage of a suite of pre-built integrations.
  • core services extensibility - Extend core application capabilities by extending the default behavior with custom features and business logic.
  • user experience extensibility - Extend core experience to support business requirements or build customer-specific digital properties, storefronts, and back-office applications.

ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer App Builder is a cloud-based solution, which means that it automatically scales. This service is also globally distributed to allow the best performance regardless of your geographic location.

Why should you learn more about App Builder

Since ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce is not a fully SAAS product, the code you develop can add complexity and upgrade issues. By using out-of-process extensibility, such as App Builder, you can provide custom, unique functionality to your ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce store without requiring in-process methods.

Other benefits include:

  • Decoupled features allow for faster time to launch.
  • Upgrades are now easier. The custom features are outside the Commerce codebase, which prevents compatibility issues when upgrading.
  • Moving features and logic outside of Commerce frees up resources that are normally used by in-process development methods.

Architecture architecture

Instead of an out-of-the-box solution, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer App Builder provides a common, consistent, and standardized development platform for extending ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Cloud solutions such as ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce including:

  • ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer Console used for custom microservice and extension development. Build and manage projects while accessing all the tools and APIs needed to create plugins and integrations.
  • Open-source tools, SDKs, and libraries to build custom extensions and integrations. Use React Spectrum (ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s UI toolkit) to have one common UI for all ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ apps.
  • services such as I/O Runtime for hosting infrastructure on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s serverless platform and I/O Events for event-based integrations. ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ also provides out-of-the-box support for storing data and files.
  • ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud where you submit extensions and integrations to publish in your Experience Cloud Org. System admins can review, manage, and approve these extensions. Once published, your custom App Builder extensions and tools are available alongside other ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud apps.

The following diagram illustrates how a standard application built on App Builder uses these functionalities:

Architecture

For more details about the App Builder architecture, see the .

Get Started with App Builder additional-resources

A n overview of composable commerce strategy, that includes the initial set-up can be found by reading the following blog post:

To help you get started with App Builder, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ has created the following documentation:

Continue learning with Documentation appbuilder-documentation

App Builder provides videos and documentation for developers, including guides and reference documentation to help develop your own custom applications:

Try Out One of the Sample Applications appbuilder-codesamples

Ready to start developing? The following link contains sample applications to help get you started:

Support support

For developer support requests, use the for assistance.

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