Cooking Up Composable Digital Experiences with HCL DX and Volt Foundry (Part 1)

Introduction: The Recipe for Modern Digital Experiences

Businesses are under pressure to deliver new features and personalized experiences. Traditional, monolithic approaches slow you down, like a kitchen with limited tools and ingredients. Every new dish requires a complete kitchen reset, making them inefficient and slow.

Composability allows you to combine independent parts into larger, more flexible systems. Its flexibility and speed are comparable to a fully stocked, modern kitchen.

Here is how we’ll look at the composable architecture: 

HCL Digital Experience (DX) with HCL Volt Foundry provides this composable kitchen, enabling teams to deliver tailored digital experiences with speed and agility.

Composable Kitchen: Hcl DX and Volt Foundry at Work

Ingredients: Your Data and Content (Hcl DX as the Pantry)

Every great meal starts with high-quality ingredients. In the digital world, we mean data, content, and assets. HCL DX provides the rich "pantry" for your digital ingredients:

• Web Content Management (WCM): HCL DX is a trusted solution for enterprise digital experiences at the intersection of content, applications, and processes. It manages all your static content and web assets, offering the textual and visual building blocks for any experience.
• Digital Asset Management (DAM): HCL DX includes a lightweight DAM capability to manage images, videos, and files. Think of this as your spice rack and fresh produce drawer, making multimedia assets readily available, with simple inline tools for managing crops, rotations, and versions, and a complete REST API for access.
• Content hub: DX offers a new content hub focused on speed and governance, ensuring all your ingredients are fresh, organized, and compliant.
• HCL DX APIs: DX offers powerful Experience APIs, such as WCM REST APIs, Digital Asset Management API, and Personalization API, making these "ingredients" accessible for processing, not just display.

Cooking Methods: Orchestrating Services (Volt Foundry as the Tools)

Once you have your ingredients, you need tools and techniques to cook them, for example: boiling, frying, baking, grilling, etc. In a composable architecture, these are your microservices and integration patterns. Volt Foundry's role as the master chef's toolkit is to provide enterprise-grade middleware and versatile cooking methods, enabling efficient data preparation and combination.

• Connect any backend: Foundry comes with approximately hundreds of prebuilt adapters and connectors to integrate with virtually any "ingredient source"—SQL/NoSQL databases (Oracle, MySQL, MongoDB), enterprise systems (Salesforce, SAP, MuleSoft), REST/SOAP endpoints, and even AI services like ChatGPT.  
• API creation and orchestration: Foundry allows you to create, combine, and manage APIs efficiently.  It can import DX API Swagger documents for seamless integration with your DX content and assets.  This is like having a recipe book for combining various backend "ingredients".
• Backend for Frontend (BFF): Foundry is a key BFF layer, delivering data and services for different "diners" (client types such as mobile apps, web portals, and kiosks). Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, it delivers optimized data packages, preventing the common problem of too many client calls and complex client logic, ensuring each plate is perfectly prepared for its recipient.
• Orchestration services: Foundry's Orchestration Services combine multiple granular APIs into a single call, moving complexity from the client to the middleware. This is akin to a chef efficiently chopping, sautéing, and seasoning multiple ingredients into a single harmonious preparation.
• DX modular services: DX supports this by its journey to break down the monolith into modularized services, evolving the platform into a modularized architecture. This means DX itself can integrate more discrete "cooking steps."

With HCL DX holding all fresh content ingredients and Volt Foundry providing the powerful cooking methods and middleware, you have everything ready on the counter. But how do you combine these elements into a final, reusable dish?

In the next part of this series, we’ll dive into the ”recipes”, HCL DX’s Composition Platform, and see how development teams collaborate to build complete digital “meals” and drive real business benefits.