Developer tutorial on building api-driven features with SilverStripe 4

[chillu]

Problem Description

Modern web sites and apps face increasing expectations among their stakeholders to be fast, robust, and cross-platform. This has lead to the idea of Progressive Web Applications (PWAs). As a collection of technical and design solutions, their aim is to feel like native software. Critical to this effort is a scalable API layer.SilverStripe 4 provides all the tooling necessary to develop a powerful API, and deliver PWAs on the web, mobile, or as a service. However, supporting developer documentation is lacking. This proposal aims to encourage developers to build their applications using leading-edge technologies and best practices, through step-by-step tutorials and technical documentation.

Key features to solve the problem

• Develop a demo PWA to provide hands-on examples for developers.
• Document high-level approach and guide through implementation through code examples
• Create and publish a new recipe for a PWA setup. This could include a headless CMS architecture with predefined routing to help developers get started, a simple GraphQL API, frontend tooling using React/Apollo/Redux, with build chain preconfigured

Key benefits

• Decoupled frontends (“headless”) allow agencies to work with vendors that don’t have SilverStripe knowledge
• More responsive user interfaces on SilverStripe sites benefit users, both in websites with interactive features and web application

Special considerations

• This proposal is well-suited for iterative delivery, with room for more advanced concepts depending on developer interest
• Excludes video tutorials.

[chillu]

Some developer feedback on what would be useful: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/silverstripe-dev/Qm3mSE9Z5aQ