Developer resources
Learn about the available developer resources to help you to build solutions with Composable Commerce.
After completing this page, you should be able to:
- Understand a documentation reference page.
- Be able to subscribe to the release notes and receive notifications of changes and new features.
- Find the commercetools SDKs and Postman collections.
The Developer Essentials learning path will give you the knowledge and skills to start developing commerce solutions with Composable Commerce. Two main resources will be referred to throughout this learning path:
Documentation
Composable Commerce comes with industry-leading documentation. Many developers working with Composable Commerce will constantly have the commercetools documentation open in another tab, and it becomes an integral part of the development workflow.
As such, being able to follow the HTTP API reference documentation is necessary for developing with Composable Commerce. For the modules in this learning path, we focus on the Customer resource. This allows you to get comfortable with one resource and not have to do too much set up work to get started.
First, take a look at how the Customers reference page is set up, so that you can understand where to find necessary information. Each reference page has a similar structure to that of Customers.
Scrolling down a little, we find a section called Representations which has the JSON objects sent by, or received by, an API call.
Following the representations we get the various operations that are possible with that resource. Below we can see the Get Customer by ID operation, where the following useful information is presented:
- The URL for the operation.
- The scopes required in the API Client to perform the operation.
- The path parameter values which must use your own Project’s specific data.
- The query parameters.
- And the possible response codes.
Following this is an example request and response.
Scrolling down, the Query Customers section shows the various parameters available to query the Customer resource, which we will cover in API queries and Query Predicates.
And finally, we also have a list of all the possible update actions for that resource.
As you can see, there is a very clear and logical structure to each reference page, making working with the docs extremely efficient.
Searching the documentation
Many users however will navigate via the search function. Let’s take a look at a search query.
As you can see, when we search for "customers" we have multiple options returned in the results. You can filter your search by the specific product you are working on. Pay attention to the different sections of the site. Those unfamiliar with the docs often click the first link as this is what they have learned from other search engines, but this isn’t necessarily the correct link. The reference page we have been looking at above is actually at the very bottom of the search results, so this is something to pay attention to.
Release notes
Composable Commerce is a product that is continuously being updated, with releases pushed almost daily. How can you best stay on top of the changes to the product? By subscribing to our release notes.
The SDKs
Finally, the other major resource that is provided for you to develop with Composable Commerce are the software development kits. SDKs are available for Java, TypeScript, PHP, and .NET. We will spend some time in the Prepare your work environment module setting up an SDK, so head on over there if you’re looking to get started right away.
Alternatively, we also have a few Postman collections you can use if you are looking for no-code API exploration.
Test your knowledge
The below questions can be answered by revising the Customer reference page.
Next module
Nice work on finishing the first module in the learning path! We would love to see you in the next module in the learning path. Click the card below and let's continue to learn the developer essentials for Composable Commerce!