Glimpse of WebSphere Commerce V9.0

This section highlights the core features/capabilities of WebSphere Commerce V9 to the best of my knowledge and understanding. 

New Capabilities

• Watson Content Hub integration
• Watson Content Hub (formerly DX Content Hub) gives business owners the power to create iconic, robust, and consistent brand experiences by using cloud-based, cognitive content management capabilities.
• Generic External Order system integration
• Generic External Inventory system integration
• Dynamic Pricing integration
• Dynamic Pricing 16.4 is a cloud-based pricing system that analyses real-time market data to provide suggestions on how merchandisers can react to competitor pricing and shifts in market conditions. 
• Taxation integration
• Integrate WebSphere Commerce with a third-party tax calculation system to provide tax calculations.
• Payment integration.
• Integrate Payment Service Provider through payment tokenization.
• Apple Pay on the Web integration.
• Externalized Customization (xC).
• New programming pattern that introduces a separation between the core application components and customizations. 
• IBM Tealeaf Customer Experience on Cloud integration.
• Enabled AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) by default.
• Migration tool to transform EJB beans to JPA.
• Adoption of Docker to support
• Distributed deployment topology
• Certificate management
• Quick Deploy (with Docker-Compose) without any additional configuration.
• IBM Customer Service for WebSphere Commerce
• This enables a CSR to perform key tasks on behalf of the guest, registered customers, for both B2B and B2C business models through the same storefront view as of any customer. 
• JQuery based Aurora starter store
• The Store server uses Spring MVC, instead of Struts

Deprecated Functionalities

• WebSphere Commerce SOI services.
• Alternate/Recommendation – Use REST service framework to work with the command framework and develop business services.
• WebSphere Commerce OAGIS messaging.
•  Alternate/Recommendation – Use REST service framework to work with the command framework and develop business services.
• Data service layer (DSL) 
• Alternate/Recommendation – Use the Java Persistence API.
• Request for Quote (RFQ)
• Alternate/Recommendation – Integrate with IBM CPQ.
• ATP inventory model
• Alternate/Recommendation – DOM Integration.
• Return process
• Alternate/Recommendation – Integrate with IBM OMS.

Discontinued Functionalities

• Support for Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) as a Web server.
• Support for Derby database for developer
• Alternate/Recommendation – Use IBM DB2.
• Sterling Configure, price, Quote
• Alternate/Recommendation – Use Modular Omni-Configurator which is lightweight and enabled for multi-device support.
• Managed files and managed directories (fileloader, fileprop utilities)
• Alternate/Recommendation – Use Watson Content Hub or a third-party file server to manage file assets.
• Search Utilities (crawler, configSearchReplication, setupSearchIndex)
• Alternate/Recommendation – Command-line search operations are replaced by RESTful APIs.
• Massload and Massextract utilities
• Alternate/Recommendation – Use dataload utility.
• Store Publish utility (publishstore)
• Alternate/Recommendation – New Gradle script replaces publishstore utility.
• Configuration Manager Tool (config_server)
• Alternate/Recommendation – The functionality previously performed by the tool is superseded by the continuous delivery pipeline.
• Migration Utilities (migrateListPrice, migrateMarketing, migratePromotions, migrateSearchFacet, migrateSolrSearch)
• Alternate/Recommendation – These are no longer needed and alternate migration approach has been defined.
• Reset database utility (resetdb) - Developer
• Alternate/Recommendation – New database can be created in DB2.
• Reset database utility (resetstores) - Developer
• Alternate/Recommendation – Project crs-web to be recovered.
• Reset database utility (restoreDefault) - Developer
• Alternate/Recommendation – Workspace to be recovered.

Programming Model

• Presentation tier is further decoupled from the business logic tier to better enable support for multiple sales channels.
• The Store server uses Spring MVC, instead of Struts.
• WebSphere Commerce services support RESTful services along with SOI and BOD services. The recommendation is to leverage RESTful services as SOI and BOD services are deprecated in this release.
• A similar recommendation to Persistence layer to leverage JPA as EJB and DSL are deprecated.

Micro Service Architecture of WebSphere Commerce

• Commerce components/layers are now loosely coupled.
• WebSphere Commerce Server, now being called as Transaction Server is separated into FIVE major functional servers to evolve into microservice architecture.
• Transaction Server
• Container server that runs transactional business logic and APIs that serve other commerce servers (Request routing, processing storefront transactions, processing REST services, hosting business and administration tools).
• Store Server
• Container server that runs storefront for all stores and holds all the storefront assets.
• Search Server
• A server that provides search engine capabilities for frontend applications.
• Customization Server
• A server that runs custom business logic as xC extensions.
• Utility Server
• Container server that runs application administration utilities. This does not exist in the development environment.
• Each functional server is available as a Docker image.
• Though the isolation is along well-defined service interfaces, there still exists some minor dependencies between the servers.
• Store, Search and Customization servers are WebSphere Liberty based, whereas Transaction and Utility Server is WebSphere Application Server based.

Reference

   Sample CI/CD pipeline to leverage WCS 9.0