Yireo - Extensions, tutorials and blog for Magento and Joomla!

This is still MageBridge

One of the demo-sites we put together to show the behaviour of MageBridge, looks an awful lot like Magento itself: The mageroot demo uses the same Magento theme as the main Magento distribution, and actually the HTML-document is exactly the same as it would be generated by Magento itself. But instead of serving it through the Magento frontend, it's served from Joomla! instead. Weird.

So it must be slow?

Because MageBridge builds a bridge between Joomla! and Magento, and because this bridge is based on HTTP (the Internet), this adds extra overhead to the performance when fetching the site. However, when Joomla! fetches the Magento HTML, it does not intialize the full Magento application like you normally would, it launches Magento through a separate entry point and this actually gives you a bit performance. So you loose a bit of performance, but you also gain a bit.

Tests we have done ourselves show that actually the performance of Magento wrapped in MageBridge/Joomla is nearly the same as the performance of a stand-alone Magento site - assuming that the hosting environment is configured properly for Magento and has no weird networking setups - like remote DNS lookups that would be needed to resolve a locally hosted domain. We actually experienced MageBridge sometimes being faster (due to cool stuff like block caching, Google API stuff and strange Protoaculous tricks) but that's not true for this mageroot demo because the HTML output is the same as Magento default.

Why? [crying] Why?

But wrapping Magento within MageBridge/Joomla certainly is certainly a lot more complex than a stand-alone Magento site. And if you compare the end-result of this demo with a default Magento site, it's exactly the same HTML output. So why bother with MageBridge. Well, sometimes our customers come up with even greater ideas then we can imagine.

One of the main SEO secrets lately is that Google prefers websites that are located in their own country. If a webshop would be serving customers in the USA, then the webshop should be hosted in the USA as well. But if you are serving customers in both the USA as well as Europe, you are facing a challenge: Most commonly, people look at cloud computing which can be quiet expensive. But MageBridge offers an alternative: While the Magento shop itself would remain on one hosting server in the US, a Joomla! frontend could be hosted on another in the Europe. In effect, you are using multiple hosting parties to host the same site.

Let me rephrase this: With MageBridge, you can host the exact same Magento shop with multiple hosting environments and thus, simulate your own cloud. Beat that.