In this article I’m not referring to the warrior who led one of the wars against Roman Republic. Spartacus is a FREE open source JavaScript storefront application that uses Angular style coding. Spartacus’ design is optimal for SAP Commerce Cloud. Using Spartacus, you can build your own B2B and B2C Storefronts for SAP Commerce Cloud and don’t need to use B2B or B2C Accelerators that come with SAP Commerce Cloud. In my previous blog, I have explained the concept behind headless commerce. Spartacus lets you implement headless commerce with SAP Commerce Cloud as your JavaScript storefront, decoupled from SAP Commerce platform and connected through REST APIs. It’s a constantly evolving set of JavaScript libraries that you can use to create your own branded storefront by importing JavaScript libraries available in Spartacus.
You might ask, do I have to use Spartacus for SAP Commerce Cloud, short answer is no. You can still use the B2B or B2C Accelerators within SAP Commerce Cloud for your storefront. The challenge with Accelerator template-based storefront is that those are not easily up-gradable. They are JSP based and tightly coupled with SAP Commerce core platform.
As more and more companies are moving towards implementing headless storefronts, you might like to go for Spartacus, particularly if you are migrating from on-premise SAP Commerce/Hybris to SAP Commerce Cloud or doing a new implementation of SAP Commerce Cloud. Though Spartacus is decoupled from SAP Commerce Cloud, it is designed only for SAP Commerce Cloud. Spartacus use SAP Commerce Cloud APIs and CMS content to deliver a fully functional B2B as well as B2C storefront. Here are some of the key considerations you should take into account to evaluate if Spartacus in good for you:
Open Source and Extendable
Spartacus is Open Source and continually developed by SAP Commerce team. It includes a set of libraries that contain a set of core libraries, components and styling. It follows its own release cycle and you have complete control of whether to accept these library updates or not. You can choose the version of the libraries you would like to use in your application to fully configure and customize your storefront. However, you never customize Spartacus code directly – rather, you override or replace styling and code. This approach allows you to easily upgrade.
Scalable & Progressive
Since Spartacus is decoupled from SAP Commerce Cloud, it can be scaled separately. You can also use CDN (Content Delivery Network) to improve page load time. It is fully compliant with PWA (Progressive Web App) checklist such as, cache first networking capabilities to cache resources locally on user’s device, Lazy Loading to control when to load specific portions of your components, etc. Since this storefront is API driven, you can use SAP Cloud Platform Extension Factor and scalable-microservices to quickly build and deploy new functionalities to your storefront.
Storefront Features
Though Spartacus library is constantly evolving, currently it includes core storefront features as Home Page, Search, Categories, Product Details, Adding to Cart, Cart Page, Checkout and Order History. Spartacus is responsive and include support for mobile, tablet, desktop, and wide-desktop breakpoints. You are also free to configure your own breakpoints in Spartacus storefront.
Support
Since Spartacus in an Open Source application, it is provided as “as-is” with no official lines for support from SAP. You need to rely on Spartacus community to post your questions and get answers.
Hope you find this blog helpful. For more details you can visit. If you need help implementing SAP Commerce Cloud with Spartacus, #asar is always here to help!