What Exactly is Magento PWA Studio?
As mentioned earlier, Magento 2 PWA Studio serves as a toolkit developed by the official Magento team to assist developers in building progressive web applications on the Magento 2 platform. This tool provides readily available, out-of-the-box PWA solutions that prove beneficial in web development. Additionally, it eliminates the risk of code conflicts, ensuring smooth PWA operation due to its inherent consistency with the Magento coding standard.
However, even with everything readily available, developers might wonder why they should bother coding everything (or part of it) from scratch. To be fair, Magento PWA Studio has its own set of advantages and drawbacks, which we'll delve into below.
Advantages of Using Magento PWA Studio:
- Modular Approach
Magento PWA Studio is modular, providing adaptable solutions that can be used selectively. You're not forced to use the entire code; instead, you can choose specific parts like Peregrin or the PWA Buildpack.
- Out-of-the-Box App Architecture and Framework
The Studio offers a crucial feature by providing a pre-configured app architecture and framework. Developers often face challenges if they make poor choices in building the application's architecture early in the development process. With the Studio, the architecture is available as a foundation with built-in consistency, addressing potential issues from the start.
- Pre-configured Application Builder
Magento PWA Studio saves development time by offering an already-configured application builder. Everything in the app builder is set up and ready for use.
- Adaptable Ready-Made App Elements
The Studio provides an extensive range of ready-made site elements that can be used as they are or customized to suit design or development needs.
- Routing and Caching Without Customization
Routing and caching are streamlined in the PWA Studio, requiring no tweaking or modification if using standard Magento-way routing in your project.
- Pre-configured Service Workers
The Service Worker, a commonly used browser resource caching tool, is set up and ready to go in the Magento 2 PWA Studio.
Drawbacks of Using Magento PWA Studio
- Code Excess
Efforts to create universally applicable solutions have resulted in excessive code, requiring developers to spend time removing irrelevant parts to avoid negatively impacting page loading.
- Code Complexity from Abstractions
Ready-made code solutions often include unwanted abstractions or potential bugs, making the code complex and time-consuming to understand and untangle.
- Significant Time Required for Studying Existing Code
Given an out-of-the-box solution, developers invest time in studying existing code to avoid reinventing the wheel before creating their code for the project.
What is Venia in Magento 2?
Venia is a Progressive Web App (PWA) storefront that operates on an existing Magento 2 backend. Follow the instructions on this page to set up and run the Venia PWA concept storefront. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a functional instance of the Venia storefront installed and running on top of Magento..
About planned features of Venia
In our previous article, where we described some features of Venia, we mentioned that some of the Magento features need to be present in this PWA proof-of-concept. However, the Magento PWA Studio team continues to work on this project, and there are existing coverage plans that describe which features will become available in the upcoming updates.
So, the upcoming releases will include support for more product types that already exist in Magento, such as products with custom options and downloadable, grouped, and bundled products.
Planned marketing features include related product blocks. Catalog management features will include creating backorders and advanced inventory management. One of the future releases may also include the ability to set up stores on separate domains. In addition, customers will be allowed to create reorders and returns.
Some features will only be available on Adobe Commerce, such as B2B stores support and marketing campaign staging and preview.
Also, the Magento PWA Studio team confirmed that some features are currently absent from the roadmap.
Such features include creating CMS widgets, adding products to comparison lists, customer reviews on the product pages, and configuring the number of items on the category page and customer account dashboard. It means that customization is required to use them in your projects.
As for Adobe Commerce, missing and unplanned features include reward points, store credits, invitations, and gift registries.
Summary
Despite its drawbacks, PWA Studio is an excellent starting point for those venturing into the creation of progressive web applications for the first time.
If you need assistance with Magento PWA development, please leave your contact information on our website for a comprehensive consultation with our expert regarding your project.
