Author Archives: alankent
Is It Useful to Categorize Modules?
Is it useful to categorize modules? Would it make Magento easier to understand? I have been working with the tech writers recently on the Magento 2 documentation and how to get concepts across in the clearest way possible which got me thinking about how to describe modules in a better way than a flat list […]
Want to Help Remove Modules from Magento 2? (Quick Note)
“I secretly wish Magento dropped the newsletter functionality entirely. It’s misleading merchants to think its suitable for email marketing” – Ashley Schroder @aschroder. Ok, so let’s ignore the bit about publicly tweeting a secret wish (!!) and talk about how this can be achieved. But before I do so, another relevant tweet in response. “Have suggested that […]
Reporting Magento 2 Issues (Quick Note)
“If I’d known a simple message was all that was needed, I would have done this myself” was a recent comment on GitHub. (I had copied the content of some tweets into GitHub. And yes, it was an issue we needed to dig into.) So just to make it clear. If you find a bug and […]
Is PHPNG vs HHVM the Right First Question? (Quick Note)
I am the first to admit I am not a PHP expert. I don’t have the same depth of PHP knowledge and experience than many others do. There has been a lot of discussion about PHPNG vs HHVM and which is faster. As I see it PHPNG is not here yet, so until then its interesting […]
Magento 2 Service Contract Patterns
As we continue to work on the services in Magento 2, patterns are emerging. This post describes a few such patterns. These patterns are going to be released on GitHub progressively over the next few weeks as code gets completed. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent any commitment on […]
Performance versus Scalability (Quick Note)
A frequent source of confusion I come across is the difference between performance and scalability. They are related, but not the same thing. Performance is speed – for example, how fast does a web page come up for a user in a web browser. Scalability is about how much load you can throw at a site […]
Magento Installation Process Thoughts
The Magento team has been looking at the best way to build and then update sites for Magento 2. The team has committed to using Composer where each module, theme, and language pack will be a Composer package. There were and are some interesting challenges. I thought others might find these interesting as well. Now […]
Magento on Docker on GitHub (Quick Note)
In case anyone is interested, I am kicking off an effort on defining a series of Docker images and topologies for use with Magento (https://github.com/alankent/magento-on-docker). This is intended for Magento 1 and Magento 2, and hopefully a useful resource for anyone looking at using Docker to deploy Magento. I anticipate this project proceeding as follows: Spend […]
A Thought Experiment – Super-Scaling Magento
This post is a thought experiment on how to super-scale Magento. That is, how do you design a system to be able to scale in multiple order of magnitude increments. Because this is a thought experiment, I am not going to worry about minor details like how much effort to implement the solution or how […]
“PHP Namespaces as flawed” NOT! (Quick Note)
@VinaiKopp tweeted about an old post “PHP namespaces are flawed” by @pornelski. I don’t agree with many of the points, Vinai asked why, too long for a tweet response so here is a quick blog post instead. I will start off saying a lot of the following is formed from my experiences from Java, but […]
Alan Kent's Blog 