Composable software architecture allows customers to assemble enterprise solutions from independent software components that each provide one or more packaged business capabilities. Rather than implementing a website using an integrated platform from a single software vendor that provides content management (CMS), commerce, search, personalization, multivariate testing, and other features, composable customers select individual components from multiple vendors to best suit their needs.
Perfection's architecture is strongly aligned with composable architecture, which provides the following advantages:
In this post, we'll explore how Perfection's architecture aligns with the principles of composable architecture and the advantages this brings.
Perfection provides software that enhances the site preview environment:
One downside of composable architecture is that customers must integrate various components to deliver a complete solution. Some approaches result in tight integration between components. This defeats one of the major objectives of composable architecture: loose coupling between elements of the solution.
In general, the greater the volume of vendor-specific code including the use of APIs, SDKs, JSON formats, command line interfaces, and anything else associated with an individual product, the tighter the coupling in the resulting solution.
Perfection's approach avoids tight coupling by minimizing the amount of vendor-specific code required to use the product and by abstracting the underlying systems such as CMS and commerce. Arguably, using Perfection requires no code at all: you use our online portal to configure your solution, update your HTML to reference libraries and styles managed by Perfection, and add some data attributes and optionally <div> elements to your markup.
Some composable software vendors and hosting platforms can provide features that overlap with those available from Perfection. For example, some CMS products enhance the site preview environment with features that open the records used to populate the page so that they can edit that content. These features are specific to the individual CMS.
In addition to the CMS, most websites also render content from one or more additional systems, such as a commerce system or product information system. A single page may therefore contain product details from multiple other systems in addition to marketing content from the CMS.
Perfection's approach works with any source system, and multiple source systems concurrently. Simply use our online portal to configure a provider for each of your source systems and attribute your markup to identify the provider and record. In the site preview environment, Perfection automatically renders links that let users edit data in any of the source systems used to populate the page.
Perfection's architecture promotes implementation over integration. Rather than writing custom code to integrate our software with that from other vendors in your solution, with Perfection, you simply attribute your markup to identify the source systems and records from which each presentation retrieves content. Based on those data attributes, Perfection automatically enhances the preview version of your website with collaboration, visual design, SEO and accessibility analysis, as well as advanced artificial intelligence features.
Avoiding custom coding reduces development and maintenance costs and reduces the risk that changes to one component in the solution could have an adverse impact on others. This approach facilitates changes to existing components as well as the addition of additional elements to the solution.
For many websites, pushing significant visual changes from the site preview environment to the public website requires code deployment. Because this can be a time-consuming process that presents some expense, many organizations minimize the frequency of deployment. This can interfere with the web team’s need for flexibility to promote changes frequently.
With Perfection, users publish changes to visual elements of the site from the preview environment to the public website without the need to build and deploy any part of the solution. Business users can publish design changes without invoking an IT process to build, promote, test, and release the solution.
Perfection allows you to add its features gradually rather than making a full commitment from the outset. Instead of requiring the entire solution to depend on Perfection, you can start with a single component or by enabling the collaboration feature only. Then, add the ability to control layout and styling for specific components and pages, and expand those capabilities after you have developed confidence in the approach.
Many organizations face challenges migrating all existing applications to a completely composable software architecture. Many companies have legacy systems that may take years to replace.
Perfection supports a gradual transition to composable, allowing organizations to migrate to modern web architecture at their own pace. This approach provides immediate results while reducing costs, risks, and disruption by spreading changes over time rather than requiring a greenfield project.
Perfection does not require that you migrate to a completely composable solution. You can add Perfection to an existing solution that is not fully composable. In fact, Perfection itself can work with CMS and other systems that are not even composable.
Perfection's architecture insulates its internals from the specific systems in use, allowing you to configure and implement the solution with minimal coding effort. Loose coupling software components allows the inclusion of new systems, the replacement of existing systems, and the addition of new features with minimal cost and risk to other elements of the solution. Using Perfection’s single paradigm to enable access to all back-end systems from within the site preview environment delivers a highly usable experience to the web team. Perfection gives you the ability to promote changes from the preview environment to the public website without the need to build and deploy. With Perfection, you can start small, migrate to composable over time, and grow functionality at a pace that suits your organization.
Ready to experience the benefits of Perfection's architecture for yourself? Contact us today to schedule a demo.