The Magento storefront is the customer-facing view of a Magento e-commerce platform. Developing for storefront implies developing for the frontend area. Whereas the adminhtml area is primarily built via means of UI components, the  frontend area makes heavy use of JavaScript (JS) components that come in form of jQuery widgets and UI/KnockoutJS components. Aside from JS components, there are lots of other bits and pieces involved in storefront development, such as themes, layouts, templates, language packages, and CSS/LESS. Our focus, however, throughout this chapter will be on JS components, as they seem to be the most confusing and challenging part of the Magento frontend to overcome.

Moving forward, we are going to look into the following sections:

• Setting up the playground
• Initializing JS components
• Meet RequireJS
• Replacing jQuery widget components
• Extending jQuery widgets components
• Creating jQuery widgets components
• Extending UI/KnockoutJS components
• Creating UI/KnockoutJS components