Update on Magento 2
Monday, 14 November 2011
Some weeks ago, the Innovate 2011 conference took place, during which some exciting news was reveiled by eBay (the "owner" of Magento). During the conference various talks also discussed Magento 2 - was it still planned (even with the coming of X.Commerce) and which features would it contain then? The first question - will Magento 2 still be developed - can be answered with yes. So that's a good start.
When is it due?
Actually, X.Commerce does not mean the end of Magento, not at all - it means the opposite: Instead of just a hosted application, Magento is able to be build partly in the clouds thanks to X.Commerce. What this means in practice still has to be proven, but it also means that the marriage of Magento, eBay and PayPal brings a lot of new opportunities. Magento will still be the hosted application we all know - and Magento 2 will improve that application heavily.
Work on Magento 2 has already begun (http://mage2.magentocommerce.com/svn/public/) and - instead of just coding and coding - one of the main improvements of Magento 2 might be that the developers try to document all their steps along the way(https://wiki.magento.com/). Magento 2 is now planned to be released in Q4 of 2012 (right before the end of the world).
The new features of Magento 2
Magento 2 will be based upon PHP 5.3 - any hosting environment that hasn't switched to 5.3 yet will become incompatible. Just like the current release of Magento, Magento 2 will include (parts of) the Zend Framework. While work is underway to release ZF 2, Magento will use ZF 1 instead. Other exciting things are the support for MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL. Among others, Microsoft SQL will allow for stored procedures which will improve database access heavily. Also, the current concept EAV is likely to disappear. Last but not least, the ProtoType / Scriptaculous framework will be replaced with jQuery.
Future of MageBridge
Escpecially the last part, the replacement of ProtoType with jQuery, is exciting news for MageBridge. With the coming of X.Commerce, we were wondering ourselves what role MageBridge would play on this - but with the new plans for Magento 2, we can definitely state that MageBridge is still here to stay. Even better, the jQuery integration in Magento will make sure that one big hassle within MageBridge implementations (JavaScript conflicts between ProtoType and MooTools) is definitively solved.