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Shopify Application Development

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Shopify

Shopify is a Software as a Service (SaaS) e-commerce platform built to meet the needs of the typical storeowner. It offers hosting, shopping cart, payment processing, order management, product catalogs, blogging, and much more. A storeowner can sign up for Shopify, pick out a design, create a product catalog, set up a payment gateway, and make a sale on the same day—all without any programming or technical expertise.

Shopify gives you the ability to completely modify the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of the storefront theme. Designers are able to add features such as visual effects, responsive designs, bundled products, shipping estimators, and social plugins that can accomplish almost everything that is expected of a modern e-commerce site.

For features such as inventory management, accounting, drop shipping, mailing lists, and, reporting, an application that communicates with Shopify's API and/or handles Shopify's XML notifications (called webhooks) is needed. In this book, we'll focus on building such an app. You should have an understanding of web development using a server-side language such as Ruby, PHP, or ASP.NET. Basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills are also required because we'll be building a simple UI. Finally, familiarity with Shopify's features will be extremely helpful. If you've not used Shopify before, I encourage you to go through this excellent primer on the Shopify blog at http://www.shopify.com/technology/3671962-developing-shopify-apps-part-1-the-setup.

Throughout the course of this book, we will be building a web application that allows the storeowners to run contests by randomly picking a customer who has placed an order in the shop. Our app will be built using Ruby on Rails (http://rubyonrails.org), which is an open source web development framework that is relatively simple to learn. It is the same language that Shopify has been written in. A few popular Ruby libraries (for example, Active Merchant and Liquid) are extractions of the Shopify source code that have been released as open source. Rails is based on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) enterprise architecture pattern, so if you aren't familiar with this paradigm, I encourage you to head over to Wikipedia for a general overview (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model–view–controller).

This chapter will cover the following topics:

An overview of the Shopify platform
App development options
The Shopify API
The Shopify Webhook system
Tips on how to get started

Getting ready to build an app

If you've decided that you need to build an app, then the next step is to ask yourself the following questions:

What exactly does the app need to do?
Will the app be private or public?
Who will be developing the app?
Who will be designing the UI?
What is the budget and timeline?

Once you've answered these questions, you should have a rough idea of the big pieces involved in creating the app. The set of features required to build a software is often referred to as the scope.

Determining an application's scope even at a high level is a skill that requires practice. This typically starts as a document that lists the overall purpose, feature list, integration points with Shopify (if known), dependencies on external services or software libraries, proprietary business logic, architectural decisions (language, platform, server requirements, and so on), budget, timeframe, and anything else that will impact the application life cycle.

Creating in-depth specs is beyond the scope of this book, though in general more information at this phase is better (it's easier to trim features and defer them at a later phase as development progresses rather than trying to cram in new ones that were forgotten in the beginning).

At the very least, a list of must-have features is necessary. Even if you are doing the development yourself and the feature set is small, it's a good skill to learn and will often reveal aspects and features that weren't originally planned. This is the technique we'll be using throughout this book. We are going to list out the high-level features that we want to build and turn each one into a sprint. A sprint is an agile methodology term that denotes a discrete amount of work. Usually, a sprint lasts for two weeks or less. In our case, each sprint will last only a few hours because our feature set is simple.

For a larger app, the simplest way to start is to list out all the features, prioritize them, and then set a cutoff based on time and budget. Even if it never progresses beyond a simple list, you'll have something to measure progress against while the app is being developed. Without this list, all the features (complete and pending) will only be in your head.

An analogy for this would be going to the grocery store without a list. Chances are, most of the things you need will end up in the cart, but undoubtedly, you'll either forget a few things (feature deficiency), spend excess time roaming the aisles trying to remember what you need by seeing something you forgot on the shelf (inefficient development/refactoring), or add things that aren't on the list (scope creep). The worst situation to be in is to have all the ingredients to make lunch tomorrow but be unable to make dinner tonight because you forgot something important!

What you will learn

Create your own multitenant app using Ruby on Rails and deploy it to Heroku

Use RSpec and FactoryGirl for TDD

Ensure functional and targeted code using iterative development

Implement responsive design using Twitter Bootstrap

Request and process Shopify API access requests

Subscribe, verify, and respond to Shopify Webhooks

Publish your app to the Shopify App Store

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Pj Marshall Jun 30, 2015

Really good if you know a bit already, I would much prefer a video tutorial though, I would buy it straight away !

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Robert Daniels Dec 28, 2014

Working through this book during my winter break, I'm really enjoying the writing style and methodology. This book not only shows you how to build a Shopify App, but it also gives you the proper Rails workflow using Git, Github, Heroku, Rspec and Guard. Support publications should be downloaded from the author's Github account, not PacketPub.

Curt H. Aug 28, 2018

Very detailed and Technical about using Shopify themes

Jim Rothfork Mar 27, 2016

I've been working my way through and while the book is aimed more at beginners, it feels like it answers a need that's currently absent in the Shopify app development community: clear, concise examples & documentation about how to build an app using Ruby on Rails. I haven't found anything else like it and while I'm not a newbie to coding, web frameworks are something I've not had experience with and this book is filling in a lot of gaps in my knowledge.

B. Bergman Aug 03, 2014

I would have to say that this book is mediocre at best. It seemed like a great start at first, but I found myself skipping over the first several chapters as being completely redundant and not helpful. I suppose for a complete newbie to Ruby or Ruby on Rails, there might be a need for those first few chapters, but I don't think the target audience for this book is the complete newb (I could be wrong). If you're going to work in Ruby, you have to have some basic understanding of the language, and how apps are developed, before you can dive into something like Shopify and expect it to work. After all, this is NOT a WYSIWYG type of tool -- it requires setup, configuration, tailoring, deploying and so on. A new Ruby convert probably won't just pick up this book and start with it.If you skip over a number of the first few chapters, then you're left with the meat of the book. In this instance, the topic is at least useful. The author goes into the basics of Shopify development, including an understanding of what it is, how it can be used, and what you need to do. Half way through the book, I finally felt like I was getting to the good stuff. Unfortunately, the good stuff didn't last long. The rest of the chapters were helpful, but only covered some basics.I wanted to like this book. Although I don't have a pressing need for Shopify, I was curious about it and wanted to learn more. As a Rubyist, I'm always interested in frameworks and applications that use Ruby. From that perspective, the book seemed like what I was looking for. I would say it only satisfied about half of my need, though. The second half was decent, but short. If you're going to spend so much time going into the basics of Ruby and Ruby applications, then at least put 2/3 of the meaty content following it. Right now I only got a taster, and it wasn't enough to be truly helpful. I suppose if you're just looking to dip your feet in the water, or you DO have very limited knowledge of Ruby, then this would be a good starting point. Otherwise, I'd probably recommend finding a different resource.

Shopify Application Development: Build highly effective Shopify apps using the powerful Ruby on Rails framework

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Shopify Application Development

Chapter 1. Getting Started with Shopify

Revealing Shopify's power

Deciding which type of app to build

Note

Note

Discovering the API

Exploring webhooks

Orders

Products

Shop/Application

Tip

Getting ready to build an app

Summary

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