What Technology Stack is Used for E-Commerce Projects?
The development of E-Commerce solutions has its own peculiarities and requires special frameworks and tools. Fortunately, there is a wide range of E-Commerce software development technologies and tools to choose from. Their choice depends on the particular business needs of a certain retailer. Businesses can use ready-made tools for building lightweight e-commerce sites or develop more complex solutions by referring to custom e-commerce development services.
In this article, we uncover the specifics of e-commerce development and explain which programming languages, frameworks, and tools to use for e-commerce projects.
What is an E-commerce Technology Stack?
Companies planning to develop an e-commerce solution usually run into a challenge: which technology stack to choose for it. What this stack should include and how to select the right one?
Basically, a technology stack is a suite of programming languages, frameworks, tools, platforms, and other ready-made solutions that are used to build the final product.
When selecting a tech stack the development team usually takes into account the two major components for the solution:
- Front-end or client-side – is the client-facing layer; front-end development languages and frameworks are utilized to create the layer that end users will see when approaching the solution;
- Back-end or server-side – is the layer that ensures application functionality; this usually involves diverse back-end languages, tools and frameworks interconnected with each other so that they can function smoothly and efficiently.
Why is an E-Commerce Tech Stack Important?
For any e-commerce solution a tech stack is the set of technologies that determines many properties of the developed solution as well as its success in the market. For example, a well-chosen tech stack shows:
- the developed product characteristics – scalability, performance speed, efficiency, security, maintainability, etc.;
- how the solution will store the data – locally or in cloud;
- how well the product can meet the business and project objectives;
- how the developed solution will function and its requirements to the devices it’ll run on;
- the complexity of the product – some tech stacks are aimed at lightweight solutions while others are composed for enterprise level apps;
- how easy for software developers to build the requested solution;
- which features can be included in the developed solution.
Top E-Commerce Programming Languages and Frameworks
Software developers implement various programming languages, frameworks, and a number of tech stacks for building E-Commerce sites. Let’s have a closer look at some that suit best for E-Commerce development.
Front-End Development Tools
Front-end development tools are used for building the components of an E-Commerce site a user can see in his browser and manipulate. Basically, everything that a user sees when he enters a site or an app is built with front-end tools.
JavaScript
Javascript is the most popular front-end programming language used for adding interactivity into static HTML pages. With Javascript, software developers can:
- validate user data on the client-side, making them load faster and use less server traffic;
- make sites give immediate feedback to its users, eliminating the necessity to wait for a page reload;
- create dynamic interfaces that respond to the users’ activity on a site;
- add drag-and-drop components, sliders, carousels, and much more.
Anyone who wants to build an E-Commerce website will need JavaScript development services as they represent the basis for front-end web development. Most front-end frameworks rely on this programming language.
Vue.js
Vue.js is a progressive open-source JavaScript framework that is used for the development of web user interfaces and single-page apps. Vue.js development services work well for creating lightweight E-Commerce websites.
Many software developers prefer Vue.js to other JavaScript frameworks as it’s super-flexible and easy to learn for React and Angular developers. This framework is simple as it doesn’t require writing long code lines, can be easily integrated into other frameworks, highly customizable to the individual needs, has detailed documentation, and an impressive followers community.
Node.js
Node.js is an open-source runtime environment that allows building front-end and back-end solutions based on JavaScript.
Node.js development has got many advantages for E-Commerce solutions, some of them are:
- Scalability. Node.js can easily scale apps in horizontal and vertical directions. It means that software developers can add more machines to the pool of website resources or increase the capacity of the existing hardware by adding CPU or RAM power in the machines as the project grows.
- Simplicity. Node.js is simple to learn for those who already know well how to implement JavaScript.
- Fullstack JS. Node.js is considered as a full-stack solution that runs on JavaScript. It means that knowing only JavaScript, software developers can build a full-fledged app or a website.
- High performance. Node.js can compile JavaScript straight into the machine code, which makes it faster to implement. Moreover, it supports non-blocking I/O operations which add to the code execution by concurrent requests processing.
- Large Community. In case software developers have any questions on Node.js they can always refer to their colleagues or download ready-made solutions and codes from GitHub. All of these speeds up software development.
Angular
Angular is a front-end framework for building dynamic web, mobile, and desktop apps. It’s considered to be a robust and comprehensive solution developed and supported by Google. Many companies prefer Angular development services for building E-Commerce sites. Angular is so good because it uses:
- Two-way data binding. It helps to decrease the development time and eliminates the necessity to create additional code to establish View and Model synchronization.
- Directives. Directives help software developers to create dynamic and rich content with HTML extensions and DOM structure.
- Dependency injections. They make code components easier to manage, test, and reuse which, in turn, speeds up software development and minimizes the number of code errors.
- Large community. Angular has strong community support on various resources. Software engineers can find a wide number of training materials, helping tools, and solve any development issues within the community.
React.js
React.js is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks used for building interactive elements on websites