Oracle Commerce | Experience Manager : Implementation Best Practices

Oracle Commerce | Experience Manager : Implementation Best Practices

As some of you may know, for a long time Endeca prided themselves on bringing back the all necessary page information – navigation refinement options, product results, sort options, and search/results metadata – all in a single query. This worked great when e-commerce pages were fairly basic and remained consistent in their composition. With the introduction of Endeca Experience Manager this all changed.

Experience Manager allows unprecedented flexibility for the business to easily configure their e-commerce pages in both layout and functionality, based on the concept of page- and cartridge templates. Using a page template structure, business users could then pick and choose which cartridges to use, and where to place them on the page. In addition, they could create separate page and cartridge configurations to trigger for any search or navigation state. A powerful combination indeed.

Behind the scenes, the Endeca Assembler framework (now also integrated into the ATG nucleus assembler) processes all this data, and ensures that all the appropriate cartridge configurations and component logic is executed appropriately. In some cases, this means that a page will still only need a single query to the MDEX engine to retrieve all the information it needs – but more commonly it will need two, three and sometimes even four queries, depending on what cartridges are leveraged.

As a prime example, the Record Spotlight cartridge will always make an additional query per page instance (unless its navigation state data exists in cache, but more about that in another blog post). So what does all this mean? Should we not use Experience Manager? No actually it’s quite the opposite – you’d be foolish not to! Instead, it’s all about how we design the solution, knowing what pitfalls to look for, and educating you – the client.

From a performance perspective, our architects will communicate these design implications up front, and ensure you understand how to use the tool according to best practices. We also push the importance of load-testing the application with a production-like set of Experience Manager page configurations – having just a few sample pages set up will no longer do. The difference between what was created and tested during development and what business users will create for production can make or break a site under load.

This is also important from a licensing perspective, as Oracle’s licensing model recently changed to where it is now based on the total number of MDEX queries made (instead of number of CPU/cores). This includes all queries, whether they come from web, mobile, or native apps. So the more individual queries each device and page experience make, well, you get the point. The good news is that beefing up your hardware footprint no longer impacts licensing in itself.

With all that said, Amplifi Commerce is excited about the power and flexibility Experience Manager is bringing our clients – not to mention the extensibility it brings us as implementation partners (a topic of an upcoming post as well). So be on the lookout for that and also the announcement of our next Experience Manager powered client launch. With it, the sky is really the limit.