I’ve been building an Open Source Ecommerce framework for Angular called Daffodil. I think Daffodil is really cool because it allows you to connect to any arbitrary ecommerce platform. I’ve been hacking away at it slowly (for 7 years now) as I’ve had time and it's finally feeling “ready”. I would love feedback from anyone who’s spent any time in ecommerce (especially as a frontend developer).
For those who are not javascript ecosystem devs, here’s a demo of the concept: https://demo.daff.io/
For those who are familiar with Angular, you can just run the following from a new Angular app (use Angular 19, we’re working on support for Angular 20!) to get the exact same result as the demo above:
```bash ng add @daffodil/commerce ```
I’m trying to solve two distinct challenges:
First, I absolutely hate having to learn a new ecommerce platform. We have drivers for printers, mice, keyboards, microphones, and many other physical widgets in the operating system, why not have them for ecommerce software? It’s not that I hate the existing platforms, their UIs or APIs, it's that every platform repeats the same concepts and I always have to learn some new fangled way of doing the same thing. I’ve long desired for these platforms to act more like operating systems on the Web than like custom built software. Ideally, I would like to call them through a standard interface and forget about their existence beyond that.
Second, I’d like to keep it simple to start. I’d like to (on day 1) not have to set up any additional software beyond the core frontend stack (essentially yarn/npm + Angular). All too often, I’m forced to set up docker-compose, Kubernetes, pay for a SaaS, wait for IT at the merchant to get me access, or run a VM somewhere just to build some UI for an ecommerce platform that a company uses. More often than not, I just want to start up a little local http server and start writing.
I currently have support for Magento/MageOS/Adobe Commerce, I have partial support for Shopify and I recently wrote a product driver for Medusa - https://github.com/graycoreio/daffodil/pull/3939.
Finally, if you’re thinking “this isn’t performant, can’t you just do all of this with GraphQl on the server”, you’re exactly correct! That’s where I’d like to get to eventually, but that’s a “yet another tool” barrier to “getting started” that I’d like to be able to allow developers to do without for as long as I can in the development cycle. I’m shooting to eventually ship the same “driver” code that we run in the browser in a GraphQl server once all is said and done with just another driver (albeit much simpler than all the others) that uses the native GraphQl format.
Any suggestions for drivers and platforms are welcome, though I can’t promise I will implement them. :)
