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Marketers looking for ways to build advanced digital experiences for desktop, mobile, and IoT have likely come across terms like “headless” and “composable” that result the endless dialogue on how to create digital experiences through API-first approaches. Many mistakenly interpret these two terms as the same thing. You are not.
Despite their common goal of connecting a spectrum of capabilities to build innovative, compelling, and omnichannel experiences, headless tools and composable frameworks represent distinct concepts:
- Headless refers to the fact that a product’s back-end is separate or decoupled from its audience-facing front-end experience.
- Composable refers to the ease of assembling experiences and who is responsible for assembling them. Marketers and business users can create experiences through highly composable platforms. More rigid, less composable systems require developers.
Let’s define headless and composable in more detail, focusing on their pros, cons, and caveats.
Why the hype about Composable is so big
Traditionally, website development has relied on all-in-one solutions or a legacy architecture that does not allow new components to be integrated unless they come from the same solution or architecture. Composable is growing in popularity because it gives developers the ability to plug and play headless products or components, resulting in optimal speed to market and the ability to quickly test, learn, and innovate. Unlike legacy solutions, Composable is always future-proof for new features and never forces organizations to demolish legacy infrastructure.
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Basically, a composable architecture impresses with its modularity and flexibility. That means organizations can gradually add components over time, slowly replacing a legacy system while it’s still in use, and integrating new tools as they come along.
Where Composable is questioned
Critics of Composable argue that it is overly complex, in part because no two Composable architectures are the same. Therefore, a stronger internal standards management practice is needed to keep developers and other employees up to date on specific frameworks and ensure consistency across the organization.
Additionally, switching back and forth between different tools within the tech stack is a complicated task for marketers and business users. Not to mention the overwhelming impact of adding too many tools, hindering teams in deciding which tools to use for which tasks.
Why this is floating around headlessly
Through APIs and microservices, headless products aim to provide narrow, purpose-built functionality. This allows brands to store, manage and deliver content with the front end, referred to as the “head” or end-user experience, completely separate from the behind-the-scenes content or commerce functions.
Three advantages are immediately obvious:
- Brands get the freedom to use the tools and frameworks they want, instead of the tools and frameworks they have to use on an old platform.
- As with Composable, the flexibility of headless gives brands control over the delivery of experiences. With the extremely rapid creativity in front-end frameworks and presentations over the past five years, which has overtaken monolithic platforms, brands adopting headless can create experiences that serve consumer needs and innovate more than ever before be.
- Headless tools give brands choices about how their overall digital experiences look. For consumers, this freedom translates into a stronger and more honest relationship with their favorite brands.
Where Headless is questioned
With headless separating the content creation process from content viewing across all channels, business users and marketers may have to rely on developer support to modify and deliver experiences, losing perspective of the overall workflow in the process.
Case in point: Business users used to building pages or standard workflows on a monolithic platform may not have the right headless tools for the task. Because APIs are tailored for developer use, most headless products perform poorly on the composable scale.
However, you can tie headless solutions into a composable system using technologies such as API aggregation tools, Front-End-as-a-Service (FEaaS) solutions, and Digital Experience Composition Platforms (DXCPs), which often offer the highest level of composability their API orchestrations and no-code tools for business users.
Implemented solutions are then left free of custom code (glue code) that connects APIs together, allowing marketers to create content and other non-technical staff to add functionality without coding. At the same time, developers gain time for more value-added projects and generating new experiences and channels to keep up with market changes.
How a headless and composable system can be problematic
The biggest pitfall for companies ready to adopt composable with headless for next-gen experiences is glue code that lurks between the back-end and the front-end and acts as a conduit connecting the repositories with the visual layer of the connects experiences. Over time, all code can dry out, harden, and clog the flow of information, almost negating the benefits of Composable and Flexible.
Additionally, each of the many tools that go into a composable solution may require additional code. All systems must communicate with each other and eventually merge into glue code. To remain composable, developers must loosely couple the solution’s components and avoid the accumulation of glue code and technical debt. Otherwise, a lot of extra work is required to replace systems stuck in the glue code, drastically slowing down marketing workflows and projects.
Because the glue code wreaks havoc, simple tasks like building web pages aren’t even feasible.
Why it’s important to learn the nuances of composable and headless
In industries like retail, financial services, travel, and hospitality, consumers want more personalized experiences that include video, augmented reality (AR), and other compelling features. Accordingly, companies need to adapt the creation process for immersive and modern experiences, keeping in mind that marketers need systems to update information on the fly, and developers need architectures that free them from tasks like content management so they can focus on tech-centric projects.
Understanding the ins and outs of headless and composable platforms is central to delivering the digital experiences that modern businesses and consumers expect. However, keep in mind that depending on the product, Headless and Composable may not work as smoothly as expected.
Darren Guarnaccia is President of Uniform.
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