Review: Ask Me Anything Event For Magento 2 Technical Team

13 Feb 2015

AmA means Ask Me Anything event for Magento 2 Developers happened on Thur, Feb 5, 2015. Have you heard about this big discussion? If not, it is right time to start right away reviewing some key points about Magento 2 in this event.

Overview of the AmA event for Magento 2

Moderator: Ben Marks, Magento community evangelist, will be moderating the session and he will be joined by Magento 2 product, architecture and technical development team members. This is a great chance to engage directly with the people behind Magento 2 and present your input on the Magento 2 beta codebase.

Detailed Content: Feedbacks or questions of magento developers about Magento 2 to Magento 2 team.

Platform: Magento subreddit

Top 10 discussions from AmA for Magento 2

Discussion 1: Which tools and software (IDE,...) does the Magento 2 team use for developing and testing?

Answer of Eugene from Magento. On a daily basis Magento team are using PhpStorm IDE. Most of the team on Mac are using macports installation of LAMP, on windows it is mostly vm and vagrant. For tests they use CI/CD environment based on Bamboo build server and cloud powered by OpenStack, tests itself are written on phpUnit.

Discuss 2: How to best experience the learning curve that will be involved with Magento 2?

Paul from Magento: In terms of "best experiencing the learning curve" I would recommend early and often engagement. This is why we have posted the code to GitHub and why we have engaged early and often with the community.

Discuss 3: When might Magento 2 be fully adopted?

Paul from Magento: The migrations will start in 2016 and increase in frequency into 2017 so that we will see critical mass of merchants on M2 by late 2017. Merchants depend on their own to upgrade to Magento 2 or not.

Discuss 4: Why should I learn Magento 2? I don’t want to invest time in learning a new system that "might" be better when I'm very confident with Magento 1.7+

Paul from Magento 2: This is of course a personal choice. Though that once the clients start asking you may be at a disadvantage if you are recommending a much older version and merchants hear the market talking about the benefits.

Discuss 5: Can you please advise if the database structure was changed with the release of Magento 2? and is it true that the Magento 2 will be using JQuery library instead of the prototype?

Eugene Tulika from Magento: Database structure didn't change significantly: some mysql indexes were removed (and added) based on its usage analysis, some fields and tables were renamed, some removed or added. But overall structure stays the same. Magento 2 uses jQuery.

Discussion 6: Is there an upgrade path from Magento 1 to 2, or is it to be considered a re-platform?

Paul here from Magento: In general terms, the answer here is it falls somewhere between upgrade and replatform depending on the merchant, though we want this to be as easy as possible. We plan to offer migration tools to help move core data entities such as customer data, product data, order data, url rewrites, and other config information.

Things like themes and extensions though are completely different between Magento 1 and Magento 2 due to architecture differences so those will not move over. We will have more documentation available as we get closer to completing migration work.

Discussion 7: Does Magento2 natively support the installation of third-party extension via Composer (without needing modman or magento-hackathon/magento-composer-installer)?

Right now - no. Use extended Magento Composer Installer (magento/magento-composer-installer). We're thinking about directories restructuring, so an extension would be able to work from 'vendor', but it needs time to be done. See also discussion on GitHub - https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/35

Discussion 8: What are the benefits of Magento 2 over community for a business like ours - online furniture retail who only trades in the UK?

The benefits we have spoken of for Community are mostly around platform to start: --modern tech stack means the latest PHP and MySQL, HTML 5, CSS 3, pre-processor support, and PSR coding standards among other improvements --improved performance and scalability benefits: the ability to have a more efficient system for both performance and scalability --streamlined customizations: easier to customize modular code, much improved theme inheritance --easier integrations=better APIs in terms of more coverage and more efficient calls --better lifecycle management=a stand alone installer from the admin that helps with install, upgrades, and also with flagging extension conflicts --high quality code and testing=a full automated test suite (unit, functional tests, integration tests, etc) to develop with confidence

All of these we think will mean faster time to market for merchants/developer.

Discussion 9: Will there be any built-in features, like: colorswatch, blog, storelocator, etc. (listing these as examples for frequent requests from our clients)? Or do you plan to leave it to the community and custom made extensions?

Paul from Magento: Yes you can expect all the features from 1.14.1 to be included like color swatches, Visual Merchandiser, etc.. We are also working on some new features such as a revised checkout and revised admin work flows in a few places. More details on those as we get into the Merchant Beta.

Discussion 10: Certifications - can you share some details when we can expect to take Magento 2 Developers Certificate exam?

Paul from Magento: I think we will need to do something special here and still working through details. Certification for Magento 1 is based on real world experience. With Magento 2 no one but internal team is really going to have experience and not even real world. So the challenge for us is how do we certify people when no one has that experience yet?

We would either be changing current meaning of certification or we need to have certification follow GA. So we are thinking about something along the lines of "Company X is Magento 2 ready" as an interim solution and that readiness would be based on specific training and perhaps some review of test deployments. As noted we are working on details but we would welcome input from partners and the community.

Here are the most popular discussions about Magento 2 from Ask Me Anything event for Magento 2. I hope that this question is helpful for you in learning Magento 2.

See full AmA Magento 2 event