Magento 2 Glossary for Non-Techies or How It’s Made

The changes introduced for Magento 2 are significant and developers, merchants and the others involved in Magento need to know the specifics of the new platform since it is almost here.



This knowledge will help to understand the advantages provided by the Magento 2 and the specifics of its usage. Primarily oriented towards store owners the Glossary below describes most prominent Magento 2 features in plain language.

Magento 2 Features in One Glossary

Composer

Composer is a packages management system for PHP widely used in Magento. Currently Magento 2 can be completely downloaded and installed via Composer, and the team seems to continue developing it for further implementations. It is used to install/uninstall third-party extensions, add new libraries, etc.

Dependency Injections

Dependency injections are the processes of object isolation via constructors aiming to make classes and objects independent for further easier development and testing. The back side of this procedure is that it creates larger code snippets, which are harder for debugging.

Docker

Docker is an open-source software automating the deployment of application in dedicated software containers. The Docker’s special advantage useful for the Magento 2 development is that it doesn’t require a separate operating system to be run within the virtualized container.

GitHub

Magento 2 uses GitHub as an official repository  from the outset. The dedicated section of the service contains both Magento and community contributions, including official Magento versions and related documentation, extensions, supporting software, etc.

jQuery Library

In Magento 2 jQuery replaced Prototype.js as the main JavaScript library.

Magento 2 Automated Testing

Magento 2 introduces advanced automated testing, which enables earlier bugs detection and reduces release overheads. The testing framework includes Units, Integration, JavaScript, Performance, Static Code Analysis, Integrity, Legacy, and Functionality tests.

Magento 2 CSS Pre-processor

Magento 2 uses the LESS pre-processor with a built-in compiler to help you customize themes easier and improve Magento performance.

Magento 2 Data Migration Tool

Magento provides  a Data Migration Tool to its users, which allows them to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2. The process is covered in the dedicated whitepaper, which explains the necessary steps to protect data integrity and reduce the downtime.

Magento 2 File Structure

The new Magento 2 file structure improves the way of Magento customization putting everything under the app structure. Wherein, each module has its own directory containing all templates allowing developers to apply code changes without affecting core files.

Magento 2 JavaScript Framework

Magento 2 supports only one JavaScript framework – jQuery thus helping to avoid potential JavaScript conflicts possible in the case of multiple frameworks.

Magento 2 New Interface

The Magento 2 new interface provides a greatly improved backend UX and allows you to comfortably manage your store on mobile and other portable devices. Product management is currently much simpler and involves the customizable Manage Products grid with inline editings.

Magento 2 Official Composer Repository

In order to simplify and unify the way of downloading Magento extensions from Magento Connect 2 it is planned to provide downloads via Composer, which will allow avoiding release and update clashes. The ultimate goal is to provide one Composer Repository for all Magento related downloads.

Magento 2 PSR Compliance

Magento 2 is going to be PHP Standards Recommendation compliant.

Magento 2 Security

Magento 2 provides better security through the improved directory structure.

Magento 2 Service Layer

Magento 2 service layer is a set of PHP interfaces sitting between the presentation tier and business logic. This layer helps to provide well shaped and defined APIs for other modules to call.

Magento Connect 2

Magento Connect is the official Magento extensions marketplace featuring both free and chargeable plugins. Currently it is being rebuilt in accordance with the new higher requirements to provided extensions regarding code originality and accuracy of the provided information in functionality descriptions, reviews, ratings, etc. This work is to result in Magento Connect 2, which will presumably be ready by the Magento 2 GA release.

Magento Connect 2 is supposed to have multiple advantages in comparison with the current directory, including extension moderation and verification, simpler installation and updates.

Magento Performance Toolkit

New Magento Performance Toolkit allows you to test and optimize system performance on a custom test environment.

Magento UI Library

Magento 2 offers a sophisticated UI Library based on LESS to speed up fronted development and customizations. UI Library goes with multiple mixins and variables allowing devs to focus on the file editing.

Redis

Redis is an in-memory database, used as cache and message broker, compatible with Magento 2.

Vagrant

Vagrant is the software, which provides virtual development environment. Starting from the 1.6 ver. it also supports Docker containers.

Varnish

Varnih is an external caching service supported by Magento 2 in addition to the built-in cache.

Visual Design Editor

Visual Design Editor is a designing tool that makes the process of layout creation intuitive and simple. Despite some considerations, it is not supposed to be included to Magent 2.0, but not ruled out for forthcoming releases, according to Alan Kent.

Zend Framework

Zend Framework 1, the final framework choice for Magento 2, has been heavily discussed just recently. Most bets on Symphony or at least Zend Framework 2  didn’t meet the reality and Magento continues to build on the first version of Zend Framework.

Conclusion

Gradually, we'll extend this glossary with new terms related to Magento 2. If you beleive that the listing above misses some important points, add you suggestions in comments below, please.