Articles 
Magento 2 webinar on Performance/Scalability Improvements And Composer – summary
- Magenticians
- September 11, 2014
After the frontend webinars, the Magento 2 team continued its tour through the kitchen with the “Performance/Scalability Improvements & Composer” webinar on the 11th of September. Here’s a summary.
Magento 2 Platform Goals
Magento 2 Platform Goals
It feels like more and more Magento 2 is being branded as an entire new platform with its own set of clear defined goals. Already sketched in previous webinars and publications, this webinar also spent some time on outlining those goals.
Composer
One of the two main subjects of the webinar was Composer integration. There were clear reasons given as to why Composer was chosen to be integrated into Magento 2. For those not yet familiar with Composer, here is an excellent introductory article.
Why Magento 2 is using Composer
Versioning
As already explained, Composer is influencing the way Magento 2 is versioned. In short, there will be a product version for the outside world and a software version in line with the Semantic Versioning standard to keep track of the code base.
Package Types
Magento 2 will make use of Composer package types for leveraging proper installation and categorization of the Magento 2 composer modules. The types which will be used are project (Composer default), magento2-component, -module, -theme, -language and -library.
Clean integration
A major goal of Magento 2 is to have proper integration with existing standards and implementations. On the to-do list of achieving that goal is PSR-0 and PSR-4 compliance, completely letting Composer keep track of 3rd-party libraries and instead of using a proprietary auto loader, using the auto loader which ships with Composer.
Installation
The webinar featured a quick preview of how Magento 2 can currently be installed via Composer. No scrolling CLI’s and live coding, but just an example of what the composer.json should look like.
In the future, manually creating a composer.json file will not be necessary; Composer integration is still under heavy development. The dedicated create-project command will be supported.
Shout-out to the magento-composer-installer project and those involved, were Magento 2 Composer integration is heavily based on.
Magento Connect will be Composer based
If we understood and heard correctly, Magento 2 still has a “Connect”-like experience but it will be fully backed by Composer (and Satis). Each package will be published on Magento its own repository storage. This way they can still function as the official module-distributor and handle things like premium-extensions and quality-control.
Magento 2, Composer and Connect
Performance/Scalability improvements
The second main subject was coined as “Performance/Scalability Improvements”. The objectives in that department were stated as “it has to go faster” but also “maintaining flexibility” and “adding modularity” were listed.
New indexer architecture
Index functionality will be available in both Magento 2 Enterprise and Community Edition. The new indexer architecture available in Magento 2 allows reindexing on the fly and partial and full reindexing as background operation. To make life simpler for end-users, the backend-interface for managing indexes has been changed:
Additionally, Magento 2 indexers no longer have a hierarchical dependency structure. Each indexer is isolated.
Indexer speed improvements. Click to enlarge
Magento Performance Toolkit
New in Magento is the Magento Performance Toolkit. It is designed to enable all sorts of performance benchmarks and tests for both merchants and developers. It is already partially available in the Magento 2 developer previews, but apparently Magento 1.X EE clients can sign up for the beta program.
One of the tools included is Generate.php for creating complete Magento webshop installations populated with data according to an easily editable configuration file. This installation can then be used to benchmark and test against.
Magento 2 and Varnish
The last part of the webinar was dedicated to caching with special attention for Varnish. Most of it was theoretical concepts but practical information is that caching layers will receive much better support from Magento 2 due to static and dynamic blocks being properly segmented. On top of that, there will be support for ESI.
Conclusion
Nothing surprising is indeed an accurate description of this webinar. Most information was already known or discussed in earlier publications or talks. That doesn’t mean the webinar had no value at all; it was a welcome addition to the mostly silent weekly code drops on Github and confirmed things which priorly were mere speculation.
Though there was a Q&A session like last time, we felt the questions asked didn’t bring any real insights and were sometimes quite repetitive and therefore decided to not compile them in a round-up.
The webinar was recorded and is said to be published on Magento’s YouTube channel in a near future. We’ll let you know when it’s availableupdate: the recording has since been made available.
