Uniform Canvas
Uniform Canvas provides composition services to your applications. It also incorporates other services such as classification and personalization into the composition process.
Uniform Canvas also gives business users complete control over the presentation layer, so they can build compositions from the components sourcing content from multiple Headless Content Management Systems and Headless Ecommerce Platforms. Such compositions are built without any changes required to the front-end code, and edge-based personalization and A/B testing features are seamlessly integrated.
Uniform Canvas comes with a notion of a Component Library for the front-end developers to register components with, powerful SDK to integrate Canvas with the existing modern JavaScript applications.
To understand the value of Canvas, consider the following three major use cases as key pillars:
Layout layer (the "neck") for the Headless, API-first world
Using Headless Content Management Systems and / or Headless e-commerce allow developers to use any modern tool they want on the front-end and deliver solutions that are performant out of the box, highly scalable, and secure. The developers have the option to use the Jamstack approach (or Jamstack Hybrid) and deploy to a modern platform, like Netlify, Vercel or Cloudflare. This makes both developers and IT happy.
However, this leaves the marketers and non-technical users in a bad place - they're unable to maintain control over the presentation layer. Code changes are needed to build new pages or experiences. Business users aren't able to use the best-of-breed headless technologies to launch new landing pages / campaigns without developer involvement and integration cost. They also often can't preview the content in context.
This sets the Enterprise adoption of Headless technologies back in terms of flexibility and capabilities and limits the ability to achieve fast time to market and overall user productivity. Canvas brings the balance back into the modern MACH/Jamstack/Headless world, where business users now have the ability to create and manage experience-level entities (pages, screens, etc.) without requiring to make code changes.
Integrated personalization and A/B testing that's dead simple
Digitally ambitious marketers didn't give up on the idea of doing personalization and A/B testing at scale. The current generation of Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs) failed to support this use case without compromising performance and operational cost/scale.
The ability to configure personalization and testing in the same place where the presentation layer is built is an incredible boost to productivity and simplification of getting started with these capabilities.
Multi-source experience composition
As both the idea of a Composable DXP and MACH architecture is getting traction; this prescribes that there is no single system of record for content. A Headless CMS of choice owns the marketing content while e-Commerce system of choice owns the product data, the media assets are owned by a Digital Asset Management system, so on.
It's cumbersome and often impossible for non-technical users to compose an experience (page, mobile screen, kiosk screen) sourced from multiple places (marketing content from one Headless Content Platform and product data from another Headless Commerce Platform).