Sunday, April 26, 2015

My tryst with Hybris... continued

Rather than making a new post on my thoughts about development over hybris platform, I felt prudent to continue my older post about SAP Hybris and bring out some of the challenges felt and my take on this e-commerce platform.
Currently, I am still a newbie developer working on various features and parts of the platform.
My team is also in the young hybris phase as explained in detailed manner here ( http://time2know.net/young-hybris-partner ) and the knowledge sharing is limited and as frustrating as it seems, the development work is generally slow due to long list of assumptions that hybris platform assumes.
One example is in implementation of AdminCockpit - where all the fields in various editors are laid out in various xml files:


< editor >
    < group qualifier="General" visible="true" initially-opened="true" >
        < label >General< / label >
        < property qualifier="B2BRegistration.title" / >
        < property qualifier="B2BRegistration.name" / >

These files are editable, but changing them yielded nothing - and no suitable help was found in hybris wiki or experts forum. Next , I tried doing ant all and searching for generated files but found nothing of importance. Finally, I tried doing an initialization of cockpit and admin cockpit which made the changes appear - the amount of efforts that I invested were shockingly huge as compared to the actual work needed.
If some hybris expert/creator reads this, I hope my plead for greater technical and functional documentation reaches - debugging without a knowledge of how the APIs function is like learning to swim inside a boat.
Development and trying to appear for hybris certification remain my top priority missions for the coming month and I hope to be a hybris certified developer after then and work on this platform for the near future.