Magento 2.0 from scratch
Monday, 25 October 2010During the Magento Developers Paradise 2010 (rescheduled because of some ash coming from Iceland) various topics passed by, but one of the most exciting was definitely the announcement of Magento 2.0 - as made public by Magento CTO Yoav Kutner.
Rewrite Magento
Magento is often blamed from being slow, often due to the heavy code base. It's database architecture is overly complicated. Some people hate ProtoType and would love to see Magento using jQuery instead. If you would listen to the community, there seem to be two sides: People who hate Magento and just say it sucks, and people who love Magento but still give hints on how to improve things.
It seems Magento has listened to both sides, by making the announcement of rewriting Magento 2.0 to an even leaner and meaner e-commerce system. What this actually means is hard to say, because development on Magento 2.0 has just started. And while the core developers are overly excited with starting with Magento 2.0, it's still much too early to know for sure what Magento 2.0 will look like. But it's exciting anyway.
When you start at your second version, start from scratch
It almost seems that the guys of Magento have read the opensource whitepaper The Cathedral And The Bazar - a whitepaper of Eric S. Raymond making a comparison between closed source and open source development: Somewhere in this excellent reading, Eric states that if you have built software that needs a good rewrite, it's best to start from scratch: Through away the old source and start all over again.
Ofcourse you will save a lot of time, because a lot of the brainstorming and prototyping has already been done. One of the technical changes is already happening - slowly Magento is shifting away from a complex database structure (based on the EAV design pattern) towards a regular relational database - making it a lot easier to integrate directly with the database level. Surely Magento has also been listening to other requests from the community - replacing ProtoType with jQuery; allowing the use of the shopping cart engine without using the catalog; improving performance in general.
Stay tuned.