Headless Odoo architecture
Alokai

In this architecture, Odoo serves as the 'headless' backend and the undisputed 'single source of truth'. All business logic resides in Odoo.

Among other things, the following components are used:

• Product management: products, variants, attributes
• Inventory management
• Pricing: Product price, price lists, discounts
• Customer data: Users, individuals, companies, shipping addresses, billing addresses, etc.

• Order processing

  • Sales order
  • Order lines
  • Shipping
  • Payment terms

Alokai is the high-performance frontend framework specifically designed for ecommerce. You can think of this as the 'presentation layer' of yourwebshop/app. It provides the structured, reusable components (such as the shopping cart, product galleries, and checkout flows) that we use to build your unique user experience. Alokai is optimized to be incredibly fast and prioritize the customer experience, but it does not contain any data itself; it is purely the interface.

The standard Alokai webshop template. This is the starting point of your website/app.

Under the hood of Alokai runs Nuxt.js, a framework that in turn is based on Vue.js. Nuxt is the engine that handles the actual rendering of the pages. The main role of Nuxt is to enable Server-Side Rendering (SSR) or Static Site Generation (SSG). This means that the web pages are prepared on the server and sent as complete pages to the customer's browser. This process is fundamentally faster than a traditional website and crucial for optimal SEO and loading times.

The middleware is the essential 'translator' or orchestrator that sits between the Alokai frontend and the Odoo backend. When a customer visits your webshop and requests, for example, a product page, the Alokai frontend does not directly ask Odoo for this. It asks the middleware. This middleware receives the request, retrieves the necessary product data via GraphQL, potentially adds content from the CMS, structures this data in an efficient format, and then sends it back as one optimized response to the frontend.

View repo

GraphQL is the 'language' used for communication between the Alokai frontend and the middleware, and often also for the middleware to the backend systems. While traditional REST APIs often return fixed, large blocks of data (even if the frontend only needs one small piece of information), GraphQL allows the frontend to ask a very specific question. For example, the frontend can ask: "Give me only the name, price, and stock status of product X." This prevents unnecessary back-and-forth data transfer, minimizes data transfer, and makes the entire architecture extremely efficient.

Redis serves as a crucial in-memory database and cache. The middleware makes intensive use of this to temporarily store frequently requested data in the lightning-fast RAM memory. When a new request for this data comes in, Redis can serve it directly without the middleware having to go all the way to Odoo. This drastically reduces the load on the Odoo backend, eliminates bottlenecks, and speeds up the website's response time to a fraction of a second, even under high traffic.