What is Magento?

Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. It is one of the most popular open e-commerce systems in the network. This software is created using the Zend Framework. Magento source code is distributed under an Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved by the Open Software License (OSL) v3.0, which is similar to the AGPL but not GPL compliant.

The software was originally developed by Varien, Inc, a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California, with assistance from volunteers.

The platform code has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, and $155 billion worth of goods have been sold through Magento-based systems in 2019. Two years ago, Magento accounted for about 30% of the total market share.

Varien published the first general-availability release of the software on March 31, 2008. Roy Rubin, the former CEO of Varien, later sold a share of the company to eBay, which eventually completely acquired and then sold the company to Permira; Permira later sold it to Adobe.

On November 17, 2015, Magento 2.0 was released. Among the features changed in V2 are the following: reduced table locking issues, improved page caching, enterprise-grade scalability, inbuilt rich snippets for structured data, new file structure with easier customization, CSS Preprocessing using LESS & CSS URL resolver, improved performance and a more structured code base. Magento employs the MySQL or MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework. It applies the conventions of object-oriented programming and model–view–controller architecture. Magento also uses the entity–attribute–value model to store data. On top of that, Magento 2 introduced the Model-View-ViewModel pattern to its front-end code using the JavaScript library Knockout.js.

History

Magento has come a long way to earn its well-deserved place in the ecommerce industry. This history of success was neither straightforward nor simple, and we, as Magento developers, appreciate and value it. Therefore, here is a brief timeline of Magento journey – from 2007 to 2019.

Back-story – Magento was a brainchild of two students of the University of California, Los Angeles – Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner. While at college, they began a project named Varien.

2007 – Rubin and Kutner saw an opportunity for Varien project in the industry of online retail, and managed to get funding for development of what will soon become a Magento framework.

2008 – Varien company released its first open source product – Magento. The name derives from the name of color – “magenta”, yet the corresponding domain name was already taken, so the founders settled for a slightly altered name – Magento.

2009 – the platform, named at that time Magento Community Edition, quickly received worldwide acclaim due to its highly customizable nature and became even more popular than osCommerce, its predecessor. Launch of Magento Enterprise.

2010 – the company changed its name from Varien to Magento to be strongly associated with its globally recognized product. Also, eBay invested in the platform worth 49% of its ownership. Launch of Magento Mobile.

2011 – due to the previous substantial investment, eBay acquired the entire company in June and integrated a PayPal system directly into Magento platform. Another significant event of that year was held for the first time – Imagine eCommerce conference, an event for Magento developers, run annually since then in Los Angeles.

2012 – one of the founders, Yoav Kutner, left his post at the Magento company.

2013-2014 – the company worked on developing new versions and improving the functionality of the existing ones.

2015 – as a result of eBay breakup and the split of PayPal from it, Magento was made an independent company by their new owner – Permira private equity. Another critical event happened that year – the release of the new platform version Magento 2.0.

2016 – introduction of Magento Enterprise Edition. It was organized in the platform-as-a-service model and was aimed for businesses of large scale, with the support of installation, configuration and usage included in the package. Moreover, the Magento Marketplace was launched, allowing hundreds of Magento developers offer their extensions and themes for sale.

2017 – renaming of two major products: Magento Community became Magento Open Source and Magento Enterprise Edition – Magento Enterprise.

2018 – Magento was acquired by Adobe company with an aim to integrate it into their enterprise CMS platform – Adobe Experience Cloud. At the end of the year Magento 2.3 version was announced; the merchants would be able to synch their Magento stores with Amazon as well as integrate their catalog with Google Merchant Center and Google advertising channels.

2019 – merge of Adobe Experience Cloud and Magento Commerce Cloud. Work on Magento 2.3 version continues.

Magento Web Servers

Apache

Apache is an open-source web-server; Magento is compatible with Apache 2.2.x or 2.4.x. Although Apache is cross-platform, it is especially preferred by retailers who chose to run their ecommerce on Magento.

Nginx

This one is a web-server that can also be used as a reverse proxy server for HTTPS, HTTP, POP3, SMTP, and IMAP protocols, load balancer and HTTP cache. It stands out with its low usage of memory and concurrency.

Magento PHP

Support of PHP allows for a faster and simpler coding routine. By default, Magento is compatible with PHP 5.5 and 5.6, but can also work with PHP 7. The new Magento 2.3.0 is compatible with PHP 7.2.

Magento Database

MySQL

MySQL is a relational database management system, relied on by the largest websites around the world. Magento is no exception – it uses the MySQL database triggers at reindexing, and at the same time, does not support MySQL statement-based replication.

Magento Additional Technologies

HTML5

This is a markup language, which is a crucial element of Magento 2 technology stack. It serves for presenting and structuring frontend components as well as simplifying the development process.

CSS3

In the theme core, Magento implements CSS that replaces links from CSS source files with the correct ones.

jQuery

This fast and lightweight JavaScript library is built into Magento by default.

RequireJS

RequireJS is a file and module loader optimizer for browsers and an essential JavaScript related component in Magento 2. It facilitates loading JavaScript resources on demand.

Knockout.js

This is a stand-alone JavaScript implementation, used to simplify JavaScript UIs with the Model-View-View Model pattern.

Zend Framework

Magento does not rely on a single Zend Framework – instead, it has its adapters and interfaces for tunneling calls to Zend Framework 1. Therefore, one must utilize the official Magento framework APIs to avoid problems.

Symfony

Symfony is a third-party PHP framework and a stack of reusable PHP components. In Magento 2 it speeds up the development work by allowing to avoid repetitive coding tasks. Moreover, YAML, Symfony’s serialization component, is an excellent format for configuration files.

Magento Optional Stack Components

Varnish

Varnish is an HTTP accelerator; in Magento it is used for caching.

Redis

This one is an in-memory data structure project, implemented for page caching in Magento.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is a search engine utilized in Magento.

RabbitMQ

This is an open-source message-broker software; used for message queueing in Magento.