Name: Introducing the Backoffice Framework in SAP Commerce Cloud
Uploaded: 2021-1-12
Duration: 641 s
Description: Get an overview of Backoffice Framework, a framework designed to simplify the creation of Backoffice applications.

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<div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><div><p>Get an overview of Backoffice Framework, a framework designed to simplify the creation of Backoffice applications.</p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>

Introducing the Backoffice Framework in SAP Commerce Cloud

Welcome to this back office framework. Overview video. We will look at the high level architecture of the back office framework. You will see how the back office administrative cockpit fits in with that architecture. We'll also discuss the relevant technologies used to build the back office framework. And finally we will introduce widgets the basic building blocks in the back office framework architecture. The back office framework is basically a software platform for developing web based applications. Just as with other frameworks, the out of the box functionality is generic. It is ready for you to configure and extend to build your own application. Because the framework is generic to visually demonstrate its features and capabilities, we will need some type of user interface that has been built with the framework. We will be using the SAP Commerce back Office administrative cockpit to demonstrate these features and capabilities. First, let's discuss what back office is and see how it fits in with the back office framework. Back office is the SAP Commerce single user interface for all backend business tools. It is provided out of the box with the SAP Commerce suite. Back office is built for both administrators and business users to manage any type of data within the SAP Commerce platform. Back office is fully integrated with the SAP Commerce Platform through the back office widgets. Learning about back office is not a requirement for working with a back office framework. It is most important for you to understand that back office is built on top of the back office framework, and provides best practices for developing with it. This diagram illustrates that back office is just one example of an application that can be built with the back office framework. Now let's focus on the back office framework and its architecture. The back office framework is developed by SAP and provides a foundation for developers to build user interface driven business tools. It is data model agnostic, which means that you can use it with any underlying data model, including the SAP Commerce type system. The back office framework is more than a UI framework. It utilizes the open source SSC UI framework and then extends it with many more capabilities. It provides out of the box widgets, which can be the building blocks for your user interface. The back office framework also comes with support for user roles, security, and other features that you would expect from a software framework. You can see in this diagram that the back office framework extends the SSC framework. One of the extensions is that it provides out of the box widgets that fulfill many e-commerce business requirements. The back office framework engine uses the SSC framework to build out the user interface of whatever application has been built with the framework by utilizing the SSC framework. The back office framework forces the separation between client side and server side development. This is a great best practice. The back office framework allows developers the choice of how to build the user interface. It can be built with the SSC markup language called Zul. The user interface can also be built using other technologies such as AngularJS or HTML5 and CSS. As was mentioned previously, the back office framework is data model agnostic. A developer can use the data integration layer to integrate with any type of data model. This means that your application can integrate with RESTful based web services, the SAP Commerce Platform, or any third party persistence framework. The back office framework is built on the following technologies Java Groovy K, spring XML and Ajax B. Now let's briefly go through each technology and see why they are used. Java is a general purpose computer programing language that is concurrent class based, object oriented, and designed to have few implementation dependencies. For more general information about the Java Programing language, you can visit this link on Java. Java is the primary language used to develop back office framework applications. All of the business logic is written in Java and SSC. User interface components are also accessible through Java code. Now let's talk about groovy. Groovy is a dynamic object oriented programing language for the Java platform. It can be used as a scripting language. Groovy is dynamically compiled to Java Virtual Machine or JVM bytecode. It easily integrates with other Java code and libraries. For more information on groovy, you can visit the Groovy Project page shown here. The back office framework provides support for the usage of groovy to prototype widget controllers. Additional information on prototyping a widget is available on the SAP Commerce Documentation help page. The SSC framework is another important technology used in the back office framework. SSC is a Java based web framework that is used for building enterprise web and mobile applications. The framework provides many powerful user interface components out of the box. SSC developers can build web based applications without having to learn JavaScript or Ajax. For more information about the SSC framework, you can visit the SSC site here. The SSC framework is used in the back office framework to build frontend components. For the most part, the SSC framework has been abstracted out, so the developers primarily work with pure back office framework. Zeke's components mainly appear within controller and view implementations. All widgets provided by the back office framework are developed based on SSC back office frameworks. Supports developers in writing Java code to implement communication between the services layer and six UI components. It does this through the Cockpit Data Integration layer. Back Office Framework lets developers use technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript for the view implementation. With the back office framework. It is also possible to add a dependency to another UI framework and then develop components with it. Back office framework is also built on the spring framework. Spring is a popular open source application framework used to build Java based enterprise applications. It provides support for all of the infrastructure and plumbing of applications, so the developers can focus on application level business logic. One of the spring's main features is dependency injection. To find out more about the spring framework, you can go to the Spring Framework Project site listed here. Spring actually consists of a number of different modules. Developers can choose which modules they use based on what aspects of the spring framework they want to use within their applications. In the back office framework, the main spring modules used are spring core and spring security. The back office framework uses XML so that it can be a dynamic and highly configurable framework in XML. Or Extensible Markup Language is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format which is both human and machine readable. For more information, you can visit the XML wiki page in your back office framework. Projects. XML is used in spring configuration files, both within the back office framework and in applications built on top of it. XML is also used in two important configuration files in applications built on back office framework, Cockpit Config XML and widget config XML. Finally, let's take a look at Jack Speer. Jack Speer stands for Jakarta XML binding and for reference was formerly known as Java Architecture for XML binding. Jack Speer allows Java developers to map Java classes to XML representations and vice versa. You can read more about Jack Sparrow from the displayed link within the back office framework. Jack Speer is used to operate on the two important XML files previously discussed. Jack Speer takes care of the mapping between Java and XML for the cockpit configuration stored within the cockpit config XML file, and the widget configuration stored within the widget config XML file. This concludes our overview of core technologies used to build the back office framework. A widget is a standalone, deployable component with a clearly defined interface and one specific purpose. Widgets are the building blocks of the back office framework. You can create your own widgets, reuse existing widgets, or both. The back office framework allows you to wire widgets together and build up your own perspective. By combining and connecting these reusable widgets. An application can be designed and created at a more rapid pace than that of typical development projects. To build a useful application with widgets, the widgets must communicate with each other. This does not happen directly, as widgets are not aware of other widgets. Instead, the framework provides a mechanism for mapping communication between widgets. A widget outputs some type of data as a message. Other widgets receive the message and act on the information if they are configured to do so. The architecture of the back office framework allows widgets to be added, removed, or exchanged without breaking the application. Because there are no dependency between the widgets, they only communicate with each other if configured to do so. Here is an example to show what a couple of widgets look like. Out of the box, when configured to display and communicate on the left hand side is the exploratory widget. On the right you can see the search widget, the list widget, and the edit widget at the bottom. To recap, in this video, we covered that back. Office framework is designed to facilitate developers to build configurable web based applications. The high level architecture of the back office framework. So now you should be able to distinguish between the back office framework, back office and the SAP Commerce Platform. The primary technologies used in the back office framework, and how the widget concept is utilized by the framework.