All About Magento Technology Stack

Disclaimer: Magenticians does not necessarily agree with the views expressed in this guest post. They are presented to bring to light all diverse views in the Magento and general ecommerce community.

With Magento, developers find themselves working with some of the most advanced tools and techniques of building a modern ecommerce store, or upgrading an existing one. While Magento is a popular open source ecommerce platform, there are some new, enhanced development methods and technologies that developers are now learning each day. These tools are boosting efficiency and performance for Magento stores, but before their utilization, they also require additional study. Despite this, Magento 2 is the revamped version with a lot of new features and requirements in comparison with Magento 1. It is a better face of Magento platform with the combination of different models, coding mechanisms, and support which is much easier for tech teams nowadays. On-site information upgrades help merchants to keep hands on Magento 2. So the question is, what are Magento developers working on, exactly? In this blog post, we will give you an overview of the Magento Technology Stack, and we will also compare it Magento 2 with Magento 1. We will also describe most of the key elements of the technology stack.

MAGENTO 2 VS MAGENTO 1

The new and updated Magento 2 built-in features make the Magento ecommerce store much smoother & faster, including various inclusions that improve overall security & performance as well. Especially compared to Magento 1 ecommerce stores. Let’s differentiate the technology stacks between both the versions:

MAGENTO 2	MAGENTO 1
Apache 2.2 / 2.4	Apache 2.x
Nginx 1.7 or greater
PHP 5.6.x / 7.0.2 / 7.0.6	PHP 5.2.x – 5.5.x
MySQL / MySQL Percona 5.6.x or greater	MySQL
Varnish 3.x / 4.x
Redis 2.x / 3.x or Memcached 1.4.x
Solr 4.x	Solr (Only for EE)
HTML5	HTML
CSS3	CSS
JQuery	JQuery (In latest themes)
RequireJS / Knockout.js
Zend Framework 1 / 2	Zend Framework 1
Symfony
Composer
PSR – 0 / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4

All components of the Magento stack are essential due to their functionalities and workflow. However, the most important elements of Magento 2 technology stack are:

1. Apache

Apache is the HTTP server known as the most popular web server in the world. It is officially a part of the Magento stack. Just like Magento 1 (which requires Apache 2.x), you’ll need Apache 2.2 or 2.4 for your Magento 2 ecommerce store. Before installing Magento 2, it is a good practice to see if you are running the right version using the command “apache2 -v”.

2. Nginx

Nginx is the reverse proxy server. Magento 2 now supports it by default, which means Nginx can be installed quickly to facilitate multiple protocols, like HTTPS, HTTP cache, POP3, and IMAP. Nginx has grown in popularity due to its low memory usage and high performance.

3. PHP

PHP is the most popular scripting language in the web development industry. It is faster in performance and consumes less memory than other web languages. Magento 2 requires PHP 5.6.x or 7.0.2 / 7.0.6. The support of PHP 7 provides more efficiency to the Magento platform that simplifies coding routines. Also, there are also some PHP extensions required by Magento 2:

• pdo_mysql
• mbstring
• mcrypt
• mhash
• SimpleXML
• curl
• xsl
• gd
• imagick or ImageMagick 6.3.7 or later
• soap
• intl
• bc-math
• openssl
• xml
• zip

PHP 7 only:

• json
• iconv

For more information about PHP extensions, see Magento official website.

4. MySQL

MySQL is one of the most useful open source databases for web applications. It is the preference of many multinational companies and software agencies like Google, Facebook, and WordPress. Magento 2 supports MySQL 5.6.x or greater versions. It ensures high volume Magento 2 projects run smoothly, saves your time and money.

5. Varnish

Varnish (an open source web application accelerator) is an HTTP accelerator that caches files or file fragments in the memory, resulting in the fastest response time and reduces network bandwidth consumption. Integrating Varnish cache in the Magento 2 stack has led to the faster performance with much less effort.

6. Redis

Redis is an advanced key-value cache that is recommended in multi-server environments. It provides a fast cache backend that remains stable and high-performing even during times of high traffic. Magento 2 also supports Redis.

7. Solr

Solr is a search platform for Magento 2 ecommerce stores. Solr enables you to provide your web store users with a powerful full-text search engine. With Faceted search, dynamic clustering using SolrCloud, database integration, rich document handling capabilities, and geospatial search options, Solr is a godsend open-source platform.

8. Composer

Composer eliminates the necessity of a third-party code management tool for PHP-based applications. It helps you declare, manage & install dependencies, ensuring that you have the right stack of PHP-based project everywhere. Magento has made Composer a key system requirement of the new and improved Magento 2 ecommerce platform. As a result, it gives a very different and new module creation experience to the developers as compared to Magento 1.

9. Zend Framework

Zend Framework is an open source, object-oriented PHP-based web application framework. Magento 2 utilizes different parts of Zend Framework 1 and Zend Framework 2. Magento 2 is using Zend Framework 2 for basic operations such as event management and dependency injection.

10. Symfony

Magento 2 picks from another framework i.e. Symfony. Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components. It is the standard foundation on which many best PHP applications are built. It also allows developers to avoid duplication of codes.

Conclusion

Magento 2 is the winner and ranks on top of the ecommerce platforms list. Significant improvements to the admin panel for power users & merchants, smooth coding capabilities for developers, overall fastest performance, support and integration of new and latest components make Magento 2 a perfect and ready to go open source ecommerce platform. If you think we missed anything in Magento Technology Stack, feel free to inform us and leave a comment in comments section below.