Introduction to App Builder

Last update: February 21, 2025

CREATED FOR:

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Developer

Historically, Adobe Commerce development has used in-process extensibility. The in-process model requires any new code to be compatible with upgrades, the server’s PHP version, and many other essential server applications and services that Commerce uses. Adobe Developer App Builder uses out-of-process extensibility to avoid these compatibility issues.

App Builder for Adobe Commerce

Transcript
In our digital-first world, every e-commerce business needs agility, power, and simplicity on its side. But because e-commerce development is so dependent on integrations and customizations, it’s been hard for teams like yours to be agile and streamlined. To customize, modify, and extend your e-commerce platform, you might spend weeks connecting to a range of services, provisioning storage, securing a hosting platform, managing security, and testing for traffic volume. After listening to the needs of the developer community, Adobe is thrilled to introduce Adobe Developer App Builder for Adobe Commerce, our extensibility platform that enables developers to extend commerce without modifying any core application code. Not only does this reduce complexity, it also lowers the cost to maintain your solution. The App Builder platform is event-driven, cloud-native, and serverless. It’s included with Adobe Commerce, which means you can focus on building apps in a low-code environment, while letting App Builder automatically manage all the backend provisions, like infrastructure, scaling, storage, security, and access control. And using API Mesh, an API orchestration layer within App Builder, you can easily compose and extend multiple APIs into a single graph. This API Mesh works with APIs from Adobe and third-party products. When you first try App Builder, you’ll see how fast and simple it is. Just create a new project, add your configurations, publish your app. It just works! What could have previously taken weeks can now be done in minutes. Extend, integrate, and build, all without the overhead of provisioning, scaling, or upgrading. Discover how simple it can be to build and deploy an ecommerce app for your organization. Try App Builder for Commerce today!

Adobe Developer App Builder is a serverless extensibility platform for integrating and creating custom experiences to extend Adobe solutions, and it’s now available for Adobe Commerce. With App Builder, you can build secure and scalable apps that extend Commerce-native functionality and integrate with third-party solutions. As a developer, you can now take advantage of out-of-process extensibility with Adobe Commerce and that in turn provides immediate and long-term benefits.

App Builder provides a unified third-party extensibility framework for integrating and creating custom applications that extend Adobe Commerce. Since this extensibility framework is built on Adobe’s infrastructure, developers can build custom microservices, and extend and integrate Adobe Commerce across other Adobe solutions and third-party integrations.

App Builder provides a way for customers to extend Adobe Commerce in various use cases:

  • middleware extensibility - Connect external systems with Adobe applications by building custom connectors or take advantage of a suite of pre-built integrations.
  • core services extensibility - Extend core application capabilities by extending the default behavior with custom features and business logic.
  • user experience extensibility - Extend core experience to support business requirements or build customer-specific digital properties, storefronts, and back-office applications.

Adobe Developer App Builder is a cloud-based solution, which means that it automatically scales. This service is also globally distributed to allow the best performance regardless of your geographic location.

Why should you learn more about App Builder

Since Adobe Commerce is not a fully SAAS product, the code you develop can add complexity and upgrade issues. By using out-of-process extensibility, such as App Builder, you can provide custom, unique functionality to your Adobe Commerce store without requiring in-process methods.

Other benefits include:

  • Decoupled features allow for faster time to launch.
  • Upgrades are now easier. The custom features are outside the Commerce codebase, which prevents compatibility issues when upgrading.
  • Moving features and logic outside of Commerce frees up resources that are normally used by in-process development methods.

Architecture

Instead of an out-of-the-box solution, Adobe Developer App Builder provides a common, consistent, and standardized development platform for extending Adobe Cloud solutions such as Adobe Commerce including:

  • Adobe Developer Console used for custom microservice and extension development. Build and manage projects while accessing all the tools and APIs needed to create plugins and integrations.
  • Open-source tools, SDKs, and libraries to build custom extensions and integrations. Use React Spectrum (Adobe’s UI toolkit) to have one common UI for all Adobe apps.
  • services such as I/O Runtime for hosting infrastructure on Adobe’s serverless platform and I/O Events for event-based integrations. Adobe also provides out-of-the-box support for storing data and files.
  • Adobe Experience Cloud where you submit extensions and integrations to publish in your Experience Cloud Org. System admins can review, manage, and approve these extensions. Once published, your custom App Builder extensions and tools are available alongside other Adobe Experience Cloud apps.

The following diagram illustrates how a standard application built on App Builder uses these functionalities:

Architecture

For more details about the App Builder architecture, see the Architecture Overview.