Transitioning from Dojo to Angular

Sterling Store Engagement (Legacy) application is developed by using Dojo framework, which is an open source JavaScript library. You can use Dojo to develop cross-platform, JavaScript and Ajax-based web applications with rich user interfaces that runs within a browser.

The baseline UI platform of the application is a single and monolithic UI application that is built with Dojo framework. With addition of new features in each release, the application code base became complex and resulted in performance degradation. Most importantly, the Dojo team has declared end of support for the framework completely, including critical security fixes. Therefore, the need to update the application to the latest UI technology was critical.

To improve the overall performance of the application, the micro-frontend architecture was adopted that uses modern UI framework such as Angular and Single-SPA. The micro-frontend architecture splits monolithic application into smaller and logical modules called as micro-frontends, and at the same time keeps the user experience similar to using a single application. In the new micro-frontend-based architecture, the application is composed of multiple angular application modules and leverage single-spa framework as a high-level router. When a route/URL becomes active, single-spa loads specific angular application based on the route. The Angular framework enabled developers to build the new Sterling Store Engagement application faster, make them highly efficient with smaller bundle resulting in fast loading of applications.

Customization

By using the IBM Extensibility Workbench, you can customize the behavior of Sterling Store Engagement (Legacy) application. With Differential extensibility, you can customize parts of the application-provided UI components. With Override extensibility, you can completely replace the application-provided components by using custom code.

The IBM Extensibility Workbench is developed by using Dojo framework. However, after the Dojo team announced end of support for Dojo framework completely, and also the tool was incompatible with the latest UI technology, such as Angular, the usage of Extensibility Workbench for customizing UI is limited.

The Sterling Store Engagement (Next-generation) solution supports UI customization by using both Differential and Override extensibility methods, without using the IBM Extensibility Workbench. The customization capability of the UI remains the same, but with a newer approach and minimal learning curve.

Note:

You can debug the application-provided source code and customization code only in the local development environment.
The appMode=dev property is not supported.