Sitecore Symposium 2018: JSS in Powerful Ways

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Adam Weber and Kam Figy of Sitecore showed us how to use JSS in powerful ways including progressive web apps.  PWAs work like a native mobile app and have support for offline mode.

Headless

• What is headless?
  • A fancy way to use a CMS as a content api
• Advantages
  • Decouple content delivery from presentation
  • Multi-channel content delivery
• Disadvantages
  • Lack of Standard CMS author features
  • Deployment complexity

Sitecore JSS

• JSS
  • Pick and choose what your need
    • Headless
    • Layout as data
    • GraphQL api
    • Modern JS framework
    • Can deliver to anything that can read JSON
      • Alexa
      • Console,
      • Mobile apps
      • Ad kiosk
  • Keep all of the Sitecore features
    • Personalization
    • A/B testing
    • Content authoring
    • Events, goals, and outcomes
    • Campaigns
    • Page views
• Layout Services
  • Provides a hierarchical nested JSON of item layout nead of html through a REST endpoint
• GraphQL
  • Customize layout service data
  • Bandwidth efficient

Using Sitecore JSS

• JSS SDK
  • Includes starter projects
  • Default support for
    • Internationalization
    • Routing
    • 404
  • Includes helpers for
    • Text
      • Similar to Html.Glass.Text
      • Enables the ExperienceEditor
    • Enums for item icons
    • Autocomplete for data properties
    • Enums for data template field types
• Disconnected mode
  • Does not require a Sitecore instance
  • MOQs the Sitecore layout service to red content from .yml or JSON files included in your project
  • CLI can use a custom template structure instead of the ones defined in the starter projects
• Connected mode
  • Requires a Sitecore instance
  • Connects to Sitecore layout service to get item and layout data
• Integrated mode
  • App is rendered server side by a Node process controled by Sitecore
  • No app pool recycle after updating JSS apps
• Headless mode
  • App is rendered by a NodeJS server
  • Rendering is decoupled from content delivery servers

JSS CLI Commands

• Create a JSS content module
  • > jss scaffold component-name
    • Will create all of the things you need in Sitecore for a module
      • Data template
      • Rendering
• Connected mode
  • > jss setup
  • > jss deploy app-name -c -d
    • Imports layouts, renderings, templates, and content into Sitecore
  • > jss start:connected

Progressive Web Apps

• A collection of technologies that work together to provide a native app like experience on the web
  • Responsive
  • Touch gestures
  • Push notifications
  • HTTPS
  • Service worker
  • Location
• Lighthouse
  • A chrome plugin that will analyze your site to see if it fits the criteria for a PWA
• Service worker
  • Can see them in the Application/Service Worker tab in Chrome dev tools
  • All of your requests will load from the service worker
    • Gives you caching options
      • Including prefetching content
  • Offline mode
    • Still calls the service work which reads from its cache

JSS was the hot topic at Symposium this year.  I’m really interested in learning more about PWA.  I wonder if these will be come first class citizens on mobile and reduce the difficulty in dedicated mobile development.
Find the rest of my notes from Sitecore Symposium 2018