FAQ

Welcome to the FAQ page for the SCAYLE Storefront Application. This guide is designed to answer your questions about our powerful e-commerce boilerplate.

The SCAYLE Storefront Application is a robust starter kit, built on Nuxt and Vue 3, that empowers you to rapidly develop and deploy high-performance online stores with SCAYLE. It's composed of two core components: the Storefront SDKs, which provide headless, design-agnostic business logic, and the Storefront Application itself, a complete Nuxt starter with all the essential features and pages for a modern e-commerce frontend.

Whether you're a developer looking to expedite the launch of a new shop or a product manager evaluating the best tools for your next project, this FAQ will provide the insights you need.

Technology Stack

Why is the Storefront Application using Vue 3 and Nuxt 3?

We chose Vue 3 and Nuxt 3 to build the Storefront Application primarily because they offer an outstanding Developer Experience (DX) without sacrificing performance or versatility.

Vue 3 is renowned for its gentle learning curve and simplicity. Its intuitive and well-documented API allows developers to become productive quickly, which is ideal for teams of all sizes and experience levels. The introduction of the Composition API in Vue 3 further enhances code organization and reusability for large-scale applications.

Building on top of Vue, Nuxt 3 provides a powerful and flexible framework that dramatically simplifies the development of server-side rendered (SSR) web applications. This is crucial for e-commerce sites, as it directly improves SEO and initial page load times, leading to a significant performance boost. Nuxt 3 handles complex configurations for you, offering features like file-system based routing, auto-imports, and data fetching utilities right out of the box.

Together, Vue 3 and Nuxt 3 create a highly versatile and performant foundation. This combination and its open-source nature allows development teams to build and extend complex e-commerce frontends efficiently while ensuring a fast, smooth, and enjoyable experience for both developers and end-users.

Why is the Storefront Application using TailwindCSS and not a custom tailored CSS framework?

We chose Tailwind CSS for the Storefront Application to provide a foundation that is fast, flexible, and immediately productive for developers. A custom CSS framework would introduce a significant learning curve, forcing teams to learn a proprietary system. In contrast, Tailwind CSS is fully open-source and has broad adoption within the global developer community, lowering the barrier to entry and leveraging a vast ecosystem of support and talent.

Its utility-first approach dramatically accelerates UI development and prototyping by applying styling directly within the markup. This method also enhances maintainability and design consistency. Despite being a framework, Tailwind offers ultimate creative freedom through its easily configurable design system, allowing you to build a unique brand identity without the overhead of creating a CSS framework from scratch.

Why does the Storefront Application not use a pre-made UI component library?

The Storefront Application deliberately ships with its own set of highly tailored and customizable UI components directly within the source code, rather than relying on a third-party library. This approach is fundamental to providing you with complete control over your project's final appearance and brand experience.

By providing our own adaptable components, we ensure you are not constrained by the pre-defined configuration options, styling limitations, or inflexible markup often found in external UI libraries. Instead of trying to override opinionated designs, you have full source code access. This allows your development team to take our foundational components and freely adapt, extend, or rebuild them to perfectly match your unique design specifications and business requirements, ensuring your storefront truly reflects your brand.

Will there be a React-based version of the Storefront Application in the future?

No, we do not have plans to release a version of the Storefront Application for React or any framework other than Nuxt 3 and Vue 3. Our commitment is to provide the best possible integration and a seamless experience for developers working with the SCAYLE platform. By focusing our development efforts exclusively on the Vue 3 and Nuxt 3 stack, we can ensure the tightest and most optimized connection to the SCAYLE backend, delivering superior performance and a more cohesive feature set. This dedicated approach allows us to build the most powerful and deeply integrated solution for creating high-performance e-commerce storefronts.

Customization & Extensibility

What are the best practices for implementing an A/B testing solution into the Storefront Application?

The implementation of an A/B testing solution is highly specific to each project's unique requirements and the tools you choose to use. Because there is a wide variety of A/B testing tools and services available, each with different implementation approaches, we cannot provide a one-size-fits-all recommendation or specific guidance. The best approach will depend on what aspects of your storefront you intend to test and verify. We recommend evaluating different A/B testing solutions in the context of your specific project goals and technical environment to determine the best fit.

Will there be other CMS integrations besides the existing Storyblok and Contentful integrations?

Currently, there are no specific plans to support additional CMS providers.

To ensure the highest quality and stability, our development is focused on the Storefront Application and its current CMS integrations, rather than adding official support for new providers at this time.

However, the application is designed to be extensible. If your project requires a different CMS, your development team can create a custom integration. We recommend examining the local "CMS" module within the Storefront Application's codebase. This module contains the existing integrations and can serve as a practical guide for how you might connect other CMS providers. Please be aware that building and maintaining such a custom integration is entirely the responsibility of your team and is not supported by SCAYLE.

Configuration & Best Practices

Should I use gzip or brotli for unstorage cache compression?

For new projects, we strongly recommend using brotli for cache compression.

Brotli offers a better compression ratio than gzip, especially for text-based data like JSON or HTML responses. This results in a smaller storage footprint in Redis or other data stores and potentially faster data transfer. While brotli's compression can be slightly more CPU-intensive, the improved efficiency is generally a worthwhile trade-off.

We continue to support gzip primarily for backwards compatibility and to ensure stability for existing tenant projects. Switching an active project from gzip to brotli would require a full purge of all cached data in Redis or other configured data store due to the incompatible data encoding, which could have a significant business impact on a running application.