GraphQL for Commerce - Making life easier for front end developers

HCL Commerce has supported Rest APIs for some time now as a headless platform. In the Winter 2021 release we now make the same server function available via GraphQL. This makes life easier for front end developers in several ways:

GraphQL was originally developed by Facebook to solve network usage problems. It was open sourced in 2015. HCL Commerce exposes GraphQL APIs alongside REST so they can be adopted incrementally in an existing REST-based front end/client application where they will deliver the greatest benefit. It can also help back-end developers in that rather than providing APIs blindly and having the scale them for all sorts of traffic, it can act as a Rosetta stone of shared understanding as to how the APIs are used.

HCL Commerce already has a lot of coverage for storefront Rest APIs. In adding GraphQL support, we created a new container that provides GraphQL capabilities to all storefront Rest APIs. This innovative approach ensures you can add GraphQL to your front-end development repertoire without the multi-year journey many other vendors needs to take to API enable their Commerce stacks. As we add more storefront capability to our core Commerce product, access through GraphQL will be there as well.

With our Winter 2021 release you now have access to all of the storefront Rest APIs through GraphQL. Let us know how this feature helps in your storefront customization efforts, and if there are other parts of the Commerce stack you would like to see GraphQL enabled.

Discover more about the latest Commerce innovations here