2 Understand the Open Storefront Framework

The Open Storefront Framework (OSF) is the next generation framework from Oracle Commerce for building commerce storefronts.

OSF runs exclusively on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle’s next generation purpose-built, best-in-class cloud platform for enterprise applications. OSF is an important leap forward in the evolution of Commerce storefront technology, focused on minimizing coding required, maintaining business level control, leveraging the latest technology frameworks, and providing robust tooling for the modern developer.

OSF has a number of benefits, including:

• Enabling front-end developers to deliver faster, more responsive, richer user experiences.
• Being built in React, but allowing flexibility to develop in any front-end library without risk of lock-in.
• Leveraging the fully-featured Oracle Commerce solution with drag-and-drop experience tools, context-aware preview, personalization, content, merchandising, search, catalog, inventory, reporting, and more.
• Providing a clean separation between the presentation layer and the state model to support local development and testing.
• Allowing micro (not macro) updates to simplify how experiences are assembled and delivered with reusable, granular components that minimize the need to write new code.

OSF is based on industry-standard JavaScript tools such as Yarn, Node.js, React, and Redux, and supports popular design patterns through an extensible architecture that uses modular building blocks. OSF enables a range of development strategies, from working with the complete framework to using only the REST API to build headless applications.

This chapter provides an overview of the Open Storefront Framework and how to develop storefront applications using it that run on mobile devices and desktops. For additional best practice and how-to material on OSF, visit the Customer Connect forum.