About

Shopify is an e-commerce solution which has a global audience. Originating from Canada, Shopify is now a recognised brand throughout the world. CC recommends this option for smaller customers as the price for a license is low but also the flexibility required for more advanced clients is lacking. CC uses Shopify as a headless e-commerce solution using it’s storefront API to update product information and integrating the GraphQL API to manage purchases.

Centra locally born and raised in Stockholm is a great solution for medium to large companies. Centra’s headless e-commerce architecture excels in it’s ecosystem of plugins to ease your workflow and flexibility creating a platform to give the customer exactly what they need. Using Centra’s range of API’s CC creates a seamless experience enabling content enriching of product data and purchasing handled directly from website to Centra’s Checkout API.

Digital Ocean broke initially through with the key difference of being built on solid state drives (SSD). If you have ever updated your computer from HDD then you’d also be sold. CC primarily uses Digital Ocean for storage of the code for the website and upon request can be used as a performant name server. This is where your website lives, breathes and performs.

AWS (Amazon Web Services) does everything you can do on your computer in the cloud — a home away from home. CC uses AWS mainly as a storage system (S3) in cooperation with Cloudfront to distribute media throughout the world on whats called a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This means that your media doesn’t need to travel as far to get to your clients. Every millisecond counts.

WordPress runs a third of the Internet which is pretty impressive. It’s relevance and support is due to it’s plug-ability to deliver whatever you can dream up. CC uses WordPress as a way to collect everything in one spot so that you can enrich every page with ease and clarity.

Electron enables web developers to create cross-platform desktop apps with Javascript, HTML and CSS. It has a rather limited use case but is a brilliant way to create an application with limited resources that needs to work everywhere. Basically put it is the Chrome web browser that shows one website and can interact with the files on your system.

React is a library written in Javascript to make lightning quick changes to a webpage. Created and used by Facebook React creates a seamless app like experience where the website doesn’t need to reload working in the user’s browser. CC leverages React to it’s fullest potential using it to create server side rendered pages important with regards to SEO (Search engine optimisation) and hydration to keep all future changes in the clients browser. Having all template code written in the one language minimizes the surface area for UI bugs and keeps costs down.

Symfony is a PHP library which compiles all the best practices with regards to development. Creating a cached performant website written in PHP. CC has created many websites on the platform before moving away from it at the end of 2016 in favor of using React.

PHP is a backend language that WordPress is run on among many other things. While technically most of  CC’s clients use PHP it’s often in combination with another library or system. Before CC started with headless commerce in 2015 our websites were built with a custom PHP setup. CC still uses PHP in setting up WordPress but not much more than that these days.

jQuery was important in making Javascript compatible with every website smoothing out quirks in early IE versions and animating content which is now done with CSS. jQuery is still useful today though not as much as it perhaps once was. CC now uses vanilla Javascript with various polyfills and React to create a lighter and better product.