Author Archives: alankent
Containerization is Reducing the Gap with SaaS
There is a lot of noise these days around containerization technologies like Docker. I this post I explore why I believe such technologies are reducing the gap with SaaS based solutions. I explore SaaS and Docker based solutions in particular, aware there are a myriad of options such as dedicated managed hosted solutions. My goal […]
Increasing Data Center Efficiency with Apache Mesos
Apache Mesos wants to make developing software for your data center as easy as for your laptop. I had put off reading up on Mesos for a while as it is more applicable to larger sites, but I had been hearing about it more frequently in the context of Docker so I finally did some […]
Magento 1 to 2 Migration Tool Plans
Once Magento 2 is launched it will become important to provide support for migrating Merchants from Magento 1 to Magento 2. There will be lots of aspects to migration – extensions, themes, custom development, and data. This post focuses on data, specifically the contents of the MySQL database. To be up front, it is currently […]
Should XSD references be real URLs? (Poll)
Today, Magento 2 uses relative file paths for XSD references. Apart from being ugly, this imposes directory structure restrictions. For example, if we want to put Composer packages under ‘vendor’ in the future, the relative paths would break. So we are looking towards using absolute paths for the XSD references. The question is what is the best […]
Magento 2 Containers and Blocks
Magento 2 has introduced containers in addition to blocks in layout files. This post is a bit of background of why, with an invitation to share your perspective. Background In case you are not familiar with the Magento 2 page layout engine, here is a quick summary. This is very similar to Magento 1, but there […]
Team Magento @ Kiva.org
Want to make a difference? I have written a few posts on using Magento for Charities (I had planned to do more), but I came across a different approach relevant more for those in the Magento community. Why not support Team Magento set up by @gxjansen on Kiva? What is Kiva? Kiva.org is a site that makes […]
A Minimal Magento 2 Extension (Guest Post)
This post walks through a recent lightweight extension designed to demonstrate some basic concepts and components needed for a Magento 2 extension. Code is available at https://github.com/coldgreentea/m2extension. (Hi all! This is another guest post by Dale Sikkema on a demo that some of the internal developers put together. Enjoy! Alan) This extension is by no means comprehensive […]
Configuration Settings – Deployed code or in Shared Store (Quick Note)
Where is the best place to store configuration settings? We have been discussing this internally recently. Two knee jerk reactions are “files on disk” and “in the database” (with the latter possibly immediately replaced by Redis or some other optimized shared storage or cache). And to be clear, here I am talking about settings that […]
Docker Machine – not quite ready for prime time under Windows? (Quick Note)
Docker machine was recently announced as a quick way to get a new VM provisioned and ready to run Docker containers. That is, it creates a new VM with the Docker engine installed in it for you, setting up the various certificate files for authentication. It knows how to talk to VirtualBox (locally), Azure, Amazon, Digital […]
Behind the Recent Magento 2 GitHub Changes
Big News! We have improved our GitHub interaction processes as a part of the Magento 2 developer beta launch to make it easier to accept community contributions. Ok, its no longer new news, but its important enough to repeat! Ben Marks published a recent blog on how to contribute to Magento 2. In this post […]
Alan Kent's Blog 