Create PHP based version of vue-storefront-api

What is the motivation for adding / enhancing this feature?

From the feedback we got it seems that the Node.js backend API layer could be a barrier, especially for experienced M2 PHP developers who would like to keep all the API methods closely to Magento and with single technology.

The idea is to create a native Magento2 module like https://github.com/DivanteLtd/magento1-vsbridge which will be 100% compliant with vue-storefront-api

By doing so Magento2 developers might have easily extend the API.

What are the acceptance criteria

• ElasticSearch should be possible to query thru this API
• all the other endpoints (including /img) should work just fine
• there should be native Magento2->Elastic indexer included within this module
• we don’t have to support graphQL endpoints from the day zero - the rest API is just fine

[janmyszkier]

IMO this is not necessary and not needed.

If you decide to develop vueSF (as in vueJS), you probably know node already (you should). If you know only PHP, you won’t be able to develop vueSF store easily anyway.

API app/module is not needed for anything but VueSF. If someone doesn’t need vueSF then why would PHP-based API help him at all? to install API backend module (instead of api backend app) and then forward work to some node-knowing frontend anyway? This doesn’t make sense.

It would also make it harder to separate vue parts from magento and put them on separate host, which was the core idea behind it - decoupling. It’s easier to cleanup node API backend right now when vueSF is not needed too, which won’t be so easy if you decide to put it up as a magento module along with additional elasticsearch requirement.

Maintenance and docs is already a problem, see how integration boilerplate docs is not even up to date right now, this additional thing to maintain will just make it worse. Unless DivanteLtd is ready to put some serious resources into writing tests and update docs, this will make potential devs more frustrated with the product (because docs won’t tell the truth) so not a good idea in the long term.

I’m posting a big NO here, contrary to the opinion above. The vueSF is a growing product and is prone to change. Creating this may slow down the development OR make one solution or the other fall behind because if you know only one language (i.e PHP because you’re experienced Magento dev) you won’t be able to contribute to both. PRs won’t be accepted for the sake of compatibility, and this will slow things down even more.

[CodeSkills]

When this gets done, I’m able to make Laravel package so anyone can easily setup a Laravel Bridge -> VSF.