Larkin - Shopify Application Development

Michael Larkin has been building software professionally for over a decade and has worked on large and small projects for companies across the globe. He has been working with Shopify for over five years and has co-created the first ever Shopify app, available at http://fetchapp.com. He has also worked on dozens of Shopify stores for which he built custom applications, modified existing themes, and added complex JavaScript to enhance the shopper's experience.

I would like to thank my wife, Sarah, for her help and patience while I was writing this book. I'd also like to thank my colleagues and friends who offered their professional and technical expertise as reviewers. Additionally, I'd like to thank the folks over at Jaded Pixel for creating such an excellent platform. Finally, I'd like to thank Packt Publishing for making all of this possible.

Joey deVilla has worked on all sorts of projects, such as creating Olympic athlete training software, CD-ROM directories for every mall in America with Visual Basic, Python-powered gift certificates, travel agency websites, the frontend for the censorship-thwarting project Peekabooty in C++, Duke of URL in PHP that suggests domain names, and a failed social networking app for frat dudes and dudettes in Ruby on Rails. He's also done some technical evangelism for OpenCola, Tucows, Microsoft, and Shopify. He's currently stirring up trouble in the mobile industry, and when he's not doing that, he's stirring up trouble playing Nine Inch Nails, AC/DC, and Britney Spears on his accordion.

I'd like to thank my family and Anitra for helping me during some really crazy times.

Christophe Favresse developed a passion for e-commerce technologies, and in early 2013, launched his wife's online retail business (www.favresse.com) powered by Shopify and Amazon fulfillment services. In less than one year, this website attracted customers from eight EU countries and the U.S. Christophe, an international sales executive in the software industry, has spent the last 15 years prospecting telecom operators and providing CRM, marketing, and risk assurance solutions to optimize their customer lifetime value and revenues. He has spent two years in Thailand and 15 years in the UK. He currently lives near Nice (France) with his wife and four children. He holds a master's degree in International Marketing from Michael Smurfit School of Business (Ireland) and a bachelor's degree in Economics from Solvay Brussels School (Belgium).

M. Scott Ford has been developing software for the last 15 years. He's worked in many industries, from aerospace to e-commerce. His goal is to stay a polyglot developer. He's worked with many different languages and frameworks over the years, but his favorites are Ruby, JavaScript, and Objective-C.

Scott is the founder of corgibytes (http://corgibytes.com), a consulting company with a focus on legacy applications. This is where he applies a pragmatic, test-focused approach to working with existing code. This results in a new life for apps that would otherwise have to be rewritten or abandoned.

Will Rossiter is a Senior Web Developer for DNA Design in New Zealand; he oversees the architecture, development, and maintenance of large-scale web applications across a range of platforms and technologies, including Shopify, WordPress, SilverStripe, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails. He is the creator and maintainer of the grunt-shopify plugin for publishing Shopify themes.

Zac Williams is a Full Stack Web Developer from Birmingham, Alabama with over 10 years of experience. Although he has experience with a variety of frameworks and languages, his specialties are Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. He has experience working on high-traffic web applications across multiple industries, such as e-commerce, healthcare, and higher education.

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Preface

Shopify has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years and their ever expanding client list means that now is the perfect time to build a killer app to meet the needs of storeowners across the globe. With the release of the App Store, customers can read reviews, see screenshots, and install apps with a few clicks.