You’ve probably heard a lot of web developer technology jargon like “cms”, “SPA”, “Node”, “WordPress”, “API”, and 100s of other terms. Let’s take quick review of some of the most common words that you need to know and then a few solutions within each category.
CMS – Content Management System
A CMS or Content Management System is used to manage the pages and content of your website and usually without needing to write HTML or other formatting tags yourself. The most popular CMS systems are WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. These CMS systems usually are very extensible each one will have 1000s of plugins to integrate everything from Google Analytics to Live Chat and Shopping Carts.
E-Commerce Shopping Cart
You probably understand what an E-commerce Shopping Cart is, but what all should they be capable of doing? In the past many developers tried to develop their own shopping carts, but this approach should be cautioned against since nowadays there are many complexities to consider. A typical E-commerce system will handle out of the box: payment integration, shipping quotes, customer registration, tax calculations, social media integration, customization of how the product page is displayed and complex product setups such as sizes or product bundles, sales and coupons, gift certificate codes, and more.
The most popular E-commerce Shopping Carts currently available are: WooCommerce (for WordPress), Magento Open Source, Shopify, Prestashop, BigCommerce, and Reaction Commerce. For enterprise level there is Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Magento Commerce (Adobe Commerce Cloud), Shopify Plus, SAP Hybris.
Single Page App
This one can be a bit confusing since the word “App” is usually used for iOS (iPhone / iPad) or Android apps. But here it is actually referring to a web application that runs without reloading every time a link is clicked. The most familiar Single Page App for most of us is when we check our email in a web browser. When you click links to compose or read emails, notice how the whole page does not reload. Rather it quickly only refreshed the part of the page that needs to change, or opens up a new email window within the same frame.This is because modern web email clients are all built using Single Page App principles.
Single Page Apps usually rely on APIs to refresh the data that is on the web page without reloading the web browser. They also typically use a front end framework which helps to refresh the web page quicker and with less JavaScript code. The most popular ones currently are Vue JS and React.
API
APIs are used everywhere on the Internet these days. APIs allow data from one application to be shared to other applications. For example let’s say you have orders from your E-commerce Shopping Cart that need to be exported to your invoicing system. Most E-commerce systems will provide an API which can export this data so that a programmer can use it and integrate it with your invoicing system.