Welcome

Introduction

Welcome to SwiftOtter's training course on navigating GraphQL in Adobe Commerce! Here you'll find a step-by-step guide to the intricacies of the GraphQL implementation in Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source.

GraphQL has quickly become the industry standard for how powerful client-side applications talk to a backend. It's an increasingly relevant topic for Adobe Commerce developers, as the platform continues to expand its capabilities in the realm of headless implementations like Progressive Web Applications.

As is the case with so many of its underlying technologies, Magento has its own approach to GraphQL, applying its own architectural layers with a host of new concepts to master in order to effectively build with GraphQL on the platform.

This course is designed to make you an expert on both communicating with Magento using GraphQL and building your own custom functionality. Our breakdowns and hands-on tutorials will familiarize you with every aspect of Magento's implementation, whether you are a beginner at GraphQL or well familiar with the specification.

Who Is This Course For?

First and foremost, this course is for Magento/Adobe Commerce developers. You should have hands-on experience with building on Magento before attempting the course, as we won't be going into detail on the basic concepts of the platform. If you're a beginner on Magento, check out our Adobe Commerce Professional Developer prep course!

Assuming you're versed in Magento development, there are two main reasons to pursue this course:

  • If you're tackling a Magento build with a PWA frontend, or any other headless implementation, GraphQL is going to be crucial to your architecture. If your Magento experience has previously consisted of building with the traditional front-end and headless concepts are new, you are hardly alone! There are right and wrong ways both to build and use GraphQL in Magento, and having a thorough understanding of this Magento architectural component will be key to your success.
  • With headless implementations on the rise in the world of Adobe Commerce, GraphQL is among the major points of emphasis in Adobe's certification exams, particularly the Master Architect certification. If you aspire to this very challenging certification but have little experience with GraphQL, this course is also for you!

What You'll Find in the Course

This course includes written explanations of architectural concepts, walk-through videos, deep dives into Magento's code, and hands-on exercises. You should take advantage of all of these types of content to get the most out of this course.

  • Make sure to read the written material beginning to end. Don't just skip ahead to the next section with a video! Major concepts have companion videos, but some sections do not.
  • Videos offer a more visual and hands-on look at the concepts and sometimes include details not present in the written material.
  • Code deep dives can be intimidating, but slow down and take them step by step! Open up the code for yourself and explore, and use your debugger to follow along with the video walk-throughs.
  • The code exercises in this course will lead you through the development of a real Magento module implementing a custom GraphQL query and mutation. Make sure you take advantage of this hands-on opportunity, as writing code will be the best way to cement the concepts you've learned. Written lessons usually offer a broad explanation of what you need to do without giving you the exact code, so the best way to approach the exercises is to give them a shot yourself first, then watch the accompanying video walk-through and review our example code.

What Is Not Included in the Course

This course is focused specifically on how Magento's GraphQL implementation works, not on developing a PWA front-end or other user-facing application. We won't be delving into PWA Studio, React, or other front-end languages and tools. For this reason, a stand-alone GUI GraphQL client is key to testing out the functionality we'll be looking at.

Planning Your Journey

You should expect to spend roughly 8-12 hours on this course. We recommend allocating yourself dedicated time and spacing your allocation out over several days or weeks:

  • Environment Setup: 30 minutes
  • Chapter 1: 30 minutes to 1 hour
  • Chapter 2: 3-4 hours
  • Chapter 3: 1-2 hours
  • Chapter 4: 2-3 hours
  • "Final Exam" exercise: 1-2 hours

Sections Without Videos?

If you've enrolled in SwiftOtter training before, you may note a difference in this course as compared with past courses: namely, that not every lesson is accompanied by a video. There are three main reasons for this:

  • Written material is considerably more extensive.
  • Most of the sections lacking videos are introductory sections that can easily be followed in your own GraphQL client, while the main meat of the course begins when we start building our custom module.
  • The more limited scope of our content allows us to offer this course at a lower price than our typical curriculum.

We are definitely interested in hearing your feedback, and how this balance of course content works for different learning styles! Send us your feedback at [email protected], or join our Slack community channel at https://certifications-hq.slack.com.

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