Inside the Innovation: How Salesforce Makes Headless Development Easier for Developers | Salesforce

Hello and welcome to Inside the Innovation with Andrew Lawrence, who is from Commerce Cloud Product Development. Andrew, what, what do you work on in Commerce Cloud?

Sure. So I'm a director of Product management for our B2C commerce developer experience. So things related to APIs and sandboxes and tool sets and SDKs and basically all the things you use to develop on top of B2C commerce cloud roll up to me in one way or another.

And you're responsible sort of broadly for the developer experience and making sure that if you're going to develop on Commerce Cloud, you've got all this stuff in the world. Yep. So what did you guys create to create a center for people to go and learn about sort of what the APIs were and how to approach headless and frankly, commerce development?

Yeah, So, I mean, it kind of started, I would say, probably the beginning of last year. In 2019, we realized that the APIs that we had for the B2C commerce platform, while we've had APIs for a number of years, there were some issues with using them. They were built, kind of call it after the fact of the platform. And we needed to be more API centric in what we were doing. And so we started off on a path where we basically built or defined APIs, what we wanted APIs to look like for the platform, to be able to do the things that you need to, to build your storefronts and to manage your environments and those type of things. And we built out in a very API first manner, those signatures, and then we proceeded behind it to start to build a new API platform to be able to run those APIs, something that's separate from the current E Commerce stack, so that it can grow with us as we continue to move forward. A lot of times what gets brought up also when you bring up the word headless, you bring up the word microservices, people, should you build the headless system so that you can talk to microservices on the other side, B2C commerce? Honestly, we don't have a lot of microservices at this point, but we want to, and we need to expand them and we needed a new API layer to be able to start to do that. So we can start to explore some of those microservices. Now, 18 months later, we have a number of them that are starting to go into beta. We will continue to have more and more microservice versions of the APIs that give us a lot more horizontal scalability and ultimately a lot more flexibility to the developer and what they're doing.

Totally. And it's, I mean, just to ask. Those APIs are fronted by a combination of microservices and other technologies that are, it's really, it's not, I'm just to say, like we're not rebuilding a microservices platform and it's not like the secret is what's, you know, it's not microservices to the rescue. It's, you know, the platform now has amazing APIs that are fronted by technologies that are the best athletes for whatever their task is.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of the reasons why I get upset about you mentioned headless and microservices at the same time is that when it comes to an API, the person consuming the API, they shouldn't care about it and what it's actually doing. So the microservices thing is much more on commerce cloud. We wanted to get the APIs out there and say this is what the APIs are going to look like and here's the new way to interact with them. Then from us on our side, behind the scenes, we can start to break things apart and create microservices. And people who have developed against the APIs on the other side don't really need to know that those are changing because we're changing them to make them more supportable for ourselves. Not so much that customers who are consuming APIs really carefully on the other side.

Yeah, I think it's sort of an artifact of how I think the major vendors that entered the market who were headless first were also microservices. And I think really we're like, not only are these APIs really hot, but we've got this unbelievable technology behind the scenes which is and equal to headless. But I think the reality is point out that there are a lot of paths to headless. And ultimately if you're going with the SaaS vendor, it's the SaaS vendor's problem to make sure those APIs are respond at non time.

Exactly.

So if I'm a developer, right, and I want to poke around and I want to see what some of these APIs are, where would I go? How do I get started to begin to experience the breadth of the headless experience for commerce web?

The interesting thing there is that when we started with the new APIs, we, we got those going and then we realized, hey, we're going to need some way to actually expose these to people so that they could see them and the public can get in and look at them. And so we started having some conversations around doing that and what it would look like middle year last year and we worked with our partners in Mulesoft and we've basically built out what we now call our Commerce Cloud Developer Center. We which you can get to, you can go to developer.comercloud.com and it'll bring you right in there. It gives you a bunch of developer information related to not just headless, but starting to get some more developer information of our other technologies. But definitely from a headless and API perspective you can get in there. There's a getting started guide for getting up and running. There is a whole listing of the APIs. You can see all the details of the APIs, what the methods look like, what the types look like. There's a mocking service that's there so you can send a request from the site to the mocking service and get a response back. And then we have downloads available to get. We created a node js SDK for the APIs. There's a sample application. There's just a lot of tools there that you can pick up and start to use and get moving. If you have Commerce Cloud and move forward on just experimenting with the APIs and building things in a headless fashion, that's really great.

A low barrier to entry to at least experience it, to get a sense of what's going on and to play with those tools.

Yep, correct.

I know that there's also a community aspect to it and that one of the goals of the Commerce Cloud Developer center was to establish a place for developers to meet developers who are working on similar problems and share code and frankly move stuff forward. How has that been going?

Yeah, so that was one of the things we had at the beginning. So the CCDC, as we called it, the Commerce Cloud Developer center, it launched in February. One of the things we had was that for each of the APIs and for the group as a whole, there are discussion groups that are available. People can get in and ask questions and the community can respond and put things in there. Actually, it's really started to take off over the last three or four months as we get more people involved in operating with the APIs and just in using Commerce Cloud. B2C. Commerce Cloud in general, yes. There's discussion groups that are there available on a bunch of different topics. There's a discussion group under each of the APIs and then we also have our own team members from product management and from our engineering teams that are in there also looking at postings and responses and trying to give answers to things. But also the community has really started jumping in. It's been great to see both customers and partners getting in there and giving responses, really starting to help each other out and answer questions that people have within there. And that's out of all the things. That's probably one of the biggest things that I'm kind of proud of that is kind of starting to pick up and take off because it really gives that sense of community and a place to go to ask questions when you have.

I think it's really great because I worked in software implementation for a long time and I implemented a number of products and one of the. One of the difficulties you have is that I think the nature of enterprise software implementations are you really sort of doing it in a silo. You have the experience of your past projects, but you may not have the like other people are solving the same problem you're solving in a bunch of different places in the same way. And it's rather than sort of searching the Internet or hoping you'll come across somebody, having a place where you can go and you know that people are solving the same problems is just seems really valuable, particularly because everyone's on the same technology, everybody's solving the same, everyone's got the same stuff.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, there's nothing new in software, but somebody else has done something similar somewhere. And hearing from other people and experiences they've had always helps to be able to get you just a little bit of a jump start to get moving in the direction that you're trying to go.

Yep, totally. So if anyone wants to try it, do you have to be a Commerce Cloud customer or can I go to developer.comecloud.com right now and sign up and see how it's going to.

Yeah, so you can get out there. The site itself is public. You don't even have to sign in to look through, browse through any of the APIs to post something into the discussion group. You sign in, it's actually connected to Trailblazer id. So if you've been on the Trailblazer site, then you actually already have a login to the ccdc. So you can get in there. That's just ask questions. To use the APIs, you can use the mock service that's available out in the CCDC right now and experiment with the APIs. To use the APIs against an actual B2C commerce cloud environment, you'd have to actually have a B2C commerce cloud environment. And that's pretty straightforward. To enable it in those environments and start using them.

That's outstanding. I think it's really. I mean, just speaking honestly, I think it's really great when a company gives people an opportunity to view it sort of behind the curtain before they make a purchase. You know, kick the tire, see what's in there, see if it's right for you. I think it shows this is a major area of investment for the company and we really care about it.

Yep, exactly.

Awesome. Andrew, this has been a great conversation. I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk to us about the ccdc.

Sure, absolutely. Anytime. I'm happy to talk about it.

Awesome. Thanks, everyone for joining us. Have a great day.