February 10, 2011 in Blog, Magento Go by magecasts

Thoughts on the Magento Go Platform

Magento Go

Its been no secret that I have been very interested in the private Beta of “Project Stratus” launched by Varien late last year. The plan was to provide the Magento experience as a PaaS; a move that would hold very interesting changes for all involved in the Magento ecosystem. Right on cue Roy Rubin announced the new hosted PaaS solution after talking about CE 1.5 and EE 1.10 yesterday at the Imagine Conference. The new service is called Magento Go and additions to the platform will be done through the Magento Go Platform. You can read more of the details online. Those of us lucky to be at the Imagine Conference were able to hound the Senior Technical Product Manager for further details, most of which I assume will be made public in the next few days in a much more coherent format than I can provide. But for now I will try to summarize some of the most asked questions and notable points.

What you need to know

• Community, Professional and Enterprise (CE, PE & EE) are not being replaced.
• New REST API’s are coming with Magento Go that give developers much deeper control of Magento
• The new API’s will be very extensive . When pressed we were told: “We are going to be be very good at covering everything”
• Eventually this sort of API functionality will migrate to CE, PE & EE but that will not be in 1.5 nor 1.10
• Developers will extend Magento by writing Go Apps which make use of these new API’s
• Your App will be written mostly in Javascript and included as a div on the page (no slow iframes)
• Apps will be able to make RESTful calls out to other cloud based services
• The foundational code that runs your App is made out of plain Javascript (No Prototype powering it, nor jQuery)
• The entire App platform is based on Widgets that already exist in CE, PE & EE
• With the new RESTful API, the power of Widgets increases so dramatically that a leading number of existing extensions can now just be Widgets
• Eventually we will have connectors that enable apps to be language agnostic of Javascript. (There was little details as to how this would be achieved)
• Eventually we will have an App Store for Magento (Connect 2??) which would be the marketplace for Magento Go apps
• Before that you will have to sell your Magento Go apps on your own and there will be some sort of authentication system for commercial extensions
• The Magento App Store may probably come at the same time as Magento CE, PE & EE support for Apps also
• No, your Magento extensions existing and planned are not going away… (yet)
• Yes the times are a-changing, you can now go dust off your Bob Dylan cd and crank it up while you read the next section

Significance

At first blush one would assume that the immediate effects would be felt by the ecosystem that has grown up around “Magento Hosting” which was being offered by a growing number of hosting companies. But as it turned out, the biggest effect would be for the developers in much more ways than you would think. As a Magento Developer, our world was relegated to PHP and XML which are old holdouts in PHP web development. In addition to that we had to work with or around Prototype, which wasn’t really so bad, also we basked in the glory of EAV. With those alone you can write some awesome customizations for Magento. Here is a quick rundown of some of where you will need to do some learning if you plan on writing Go Apps. The list is by no means comprehensive, but just enough to get started until more details arise.

Javascript – Look I know you know how to write Javascript already but… I am just saying, maybe you should do a little reading up on Douglas Crockford and what he has to say about Javascript. It will help you keep your hair when your Go Apps start getting a little complicated.

JSON-RPC – There is going to be a lot of communication taking place via JSON-RPC, its best to start getting familiar with it. By the way Douglas Crockford wrote the RFC for the JSON standard. Another reason you should listen to what he has to say.

Caja – Caja was started by Google and it aims to set rules for Javascript security when working with objects. It will be used for various forms of authentication by your App. I first heard about Caja from … you guessed it Douglas Crockford. Back then he seemed hopeful and curious about the project and assumed it was going in the right direction when it comes to Javascript security.

REST – You may already be familiar with REST and RESTful APIs, but if not you should be warned that developers have been known to get English-soccer-religious when it comes to RESTfulness and true RESTfulness. The Magento API’s aim to be as cleanly and truly RESTful as they can be, so please don’t get the pitchforks out if you spot an inconsistency.

Shindig & OpenSocial – OpenSocial has little to do with Facebook, Foursquare or Twitter. It was originally created by Google and used for the iGoogle gadgets page. Since then it was made into an open standard called OpenSocial and Shindig is the Apache Foundation’s container to speed up development with OpenSocial. I haven’t heard of either of these projects so will be doing a lot of reading about it in the coming days/planeflights.

Yes! An App Store!

Wait… not so fast. This isn’t your iTunes app store dreams realized on Magento. I am sure analogies will be drawn and people will begin to muse about the walled-garden that was being installed in the jungle of Magento Community. I went down that path while speaking with Alan Storm and Ashley Schroder last night but I believe we gave it little attention. The following is my predictions only and really has little to do with either of these brilliant minds. The fact that they didn’t pay much attention to it, probably means I am wrong for even trying.

I personally don’t think the Magento Connect store will have the explosion of iFart apps and ridiculous foaming at the mouth that the iTunes store has managed to draw out of people. Don’t get me wrong there will be the gamut of apps in there and contributions from those that recognize that e-commerce is profitable and create the e-commerce equivalent of iFart Apps. However, the Magento Connect 2 store will cater to an inherently different crowd all together and I don’t believe strong associations can be drawn to the iTunes store for this very fact.

Closer associations can probably be drawn to the launch and successes of force.com which caters to building apps for the business crowd using the Salesforce foundations. Sadly I usually just skimmed of the the news of Force.com and indepth analysis of its success from my plethora of news sites so am completely unaware of this growth, challenges, successes and limitations. And I know that there are a many Magento developers in the same boat. Jon Jessup is the CEO & Founder of Cloud Conversion which is a company very much entrenched in the Salesforce world and Force.com. Yesterday when he asked some 100 odd Magento Developers if they use or are familiar with Salesforce and Force.com, the only ones that responded were his clients that were in attendance. As Magento Developers we need to take a step back and learn from another platform that we probably have all ignored as it blazed a trail we should have known we would eventually follow.