Java Basics: What Is SAP Commerce Cloud?

SAP Commerce Cloud, formerly known as SAP Hybris, is a collection of e-commerce and product CMS solutions used by many large companies to power their applications. With its blend of customer behavior analysis, extensive support, and scalability, it's a good choice for enterprises. But it does have drawbacks.

In this blog, we give a high-level overview of SAP Commerce Cloud, what it is, what it does, how it's used, and discuss the pros and cons of SAP Commerce Cloud for development teams considering the platform.

What Is SAP Commerce Cloud?

SAP Commerce Cloud provides solutions for any organization interested in creating a cost and time efficient customer experience. But what sets it apart is that it does this while reducing the complexity inherent to building a scalable enterprise system capable of delivering a good customer experience.

SAP Commerce Cloud is a large family of products that at their core will provide any given user the ideal customer experience possible. SAP Commerce Cloud focuses on a variety of different areas, including:

• E-commerce - provides easy channel communication for B2C, B2B, merchandising and more to better understand exactly how to figure out what any given customer wants and how to convert them into regular buyers of your product.
• Marketing - SAP Commerce Cloud enables analysis of customer behavior done in real-time.
• Sales - SAP Commerce Cloud helps process customer details in a way that allows sales teams to better target customers and optimize each opportunity bought in.
• Services - Allowing for great customer engagement is what keeps your customers coming back for more and the services aspect ensures that you can employ effective strategies to ensure that.

Why Use SAP Commerce Cloud?

When it comes to working with all these different systems for any given e-commerce company, it is difficult to identify what tools and technology will be best to work for each scenario.

Often companies, especially smaller companies, will purchase technology to address each need as the problem arises. This results in all kinds of difficulty making each of these different technologies to work together and pass information properly. And even if you do get this figured out, the information being passed as well as the maintenance required to maintain is quite expensive.

Having one product that can provide all these connections provides users with an easy solution that requires minimal work to setup.

What Language Is SAP Commerce Cloud Written in?

SAP Commerce Cloud is written mainly in Java with some Javascript used for the front-end.

It is created using storefronts that are built using the Spring MVC framework. The extensibility provided by SAP makes it very easy for any Java developer to be able to pick up SAP Commerce Cloud and learn how to use it with relative ease.

What Is SAP Commerce Cloud Used For?

SAP Hybris is principally used to create eCommerce applications for enterprise level companies. Mid to large companies would be most likely to use Hybris in their applications. Hybris can provide users with all the connections necessary to be develop and grow their business.

Pros and Cons of SAP Commerce Cloud Development

As mentioned, SAP Commerce Cloud does have some drawbacks. Because of the size of the platform, and the default technologies incorporated into it, the build process can be long. It also had a considerable learning curve, requiring extensive training and expertise in order to modify the business application.

But the benefits of SAP Commerce Cloud typically outweigh the cons. Because it provides a large suite of functionalities that work well together, it makes developing and scaling with SAP Commerce Cloud easy. Add to that the ability to analyze customer experience and manage customer relationships, and it's easy to see why SAP Commerce Cloud is a popular choice for enterprise Java applications. 

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Redeploy Times in SAP Commerce Cloud

As shown discussed above, SAP Commerce Cloud has a number of great benefits that can be utilized by companies to create and maintain e-commerce business within an enterprise company.

However, one of the more glaring issues on SAP Commerce Cloud is the fact that the application is built into one Ant build. While this makes production easier overall, it also makes it very painful for Java developers to modify and build out the Hybris application that they are working on.

We find that the median Java developer working on a SAP Commerce Cloud application is spending somewhere around 1 hour per day waiting for their Hybris application to build after a change to the application. JRebel provides Java developers with the ability to see those changes on the fly — without having to run the Ant build. 

JRebel does this by modifying the classloaders run in the Tomcat server embedded in the Hybris build. By having those classloaders monitor the classes updated through the developer’s IDE, JRebel makes changes occur on the fly without having to build or restart the Tomcat server.

📚 Further reading: Dive into the features, benefits, and uses of SAP Commerce Cloud. 

Final Thoughts

In this blog, we gave a high level overview of SAP Commerce Cloud, and why teams may use it to help power their business. With a great set of benefits, and a suite of impressive and synergistic functionalities, it's easy to see why so many medium to large-scale businesses rely on Hybris to accomplish their goals.

Those benefits do come alongside some obvious downsides, like long redeploy times. But for teams who are interested in the functionality, JRebel offers an easy, cost-effective way to get those features and while avoiding lengthy redeploy times.

Want to see how JRebel can streamline your SAP Commerce Cloud development? 

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