Show notes
(full transcript below show notes)

Yireo - The unstable release of Magento 2.4.0
Magento Semantic Version Checker

hirak/prestissimo
Composer 2
narrowspark/automatic-composer-prefetcher
Magento 2.3.5 + Content Security Policy (CSP): A Fool's Errand
Private Packagist
Satis
Magento 2 Marketplace Mirror by Fooman
Ivan Chepurnyi on Twitter
Stephan Hochdörfer on Twitter

Full transcript

PJ: All right, everybody. You're welcome at the first Registry podcast. The Registry podcast is done by me, Peter Jaap Blaakmeer

Jisse: And me, Jisse Reitsma

PJ: We're two Dutch Magento developers. I run an agency called Elgentos, and Jisse what do you do? 

Jisse: I run an agency called Yireo and what I do is actually I'm not a real agency, but more like a trainer of developers. 

PJ: Yeah. I've actually received training from you. 

Jisse: Yeah, you did, right? So, sometime back on react. So yeah, I'm kind of busy with a lot of front end stuff, but I think the initial thoughts for this podcast, the Registry is to talk about back end development instead. But yeah, it's your ID so why is it called the Registry in the first place? 

PJ: I needed a name that struck a chord with Magento developers and since the Registry is deprecated in Magento too I thought, “Let's just re-live the name if we use it.” 

Jisse: Yeah. So the Registry really feels like old. To me, there's also this reminder towards the old Windows age. I'm not sure if Windows is still using a registry. I don’t know anymore.

PJ: Isn't it register, like register.exe?

PJ: Well, it's register.xe or it's referred to as the registry, I thought. But anyway, there's a podcast now called The Registry. 

PJ: Yep. And we're going to talk about, well, you said mainly back end development and I guess that's debatable. I'm a back end developer first and foremost, you are originally a back end developer, but you've gravitated towards the front-end a bit more lately.

Jisse: Yeah. Well, and that's maybe also because there's kind of a need within the front end developers to discuss, basically the alternatives that you have for Magento 2 front-ending because there's a lot of things to tell about the Magento 2 frontends. I simply just dive into it a little bit more. But yeah, maybe that's the whole idea about this Registry as well, to talk about interesting stuff to either back end developers or front end developers. 

PJ: Yeah or front end stuff for back end developers, which is hard for us. 

Jisse: Yeah or back end stuff for front-enders. 

PJ: I always have the feeling that's easier than the other way around, but that might be my bias being a back end developer. 

Jisse: Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, let's keep the current episode one a little bit focused on back end development stats, but also maybe it may be some general news. So I think when discussing what kind of topics to pick up on I think it was kind of obvious to tell at least a little bit about Magento 2.4, which was just released one week, two weeks ago. I don't know anymore, but recently, a little bit longer, right?

PJ: Yeah. 

Jisse: Time flies. But anyway, instead of just doing all of the marketing fluff and saying like, “Oh, Magento 2.4.0 is wonderful. It's great. You should upgrade. I think in this podcast, we want to be a little bit more developer minded or honest or 

PJ: Critical?

Jisse: I think so, yeah. So there are multiple features like the MSI performance that went up by refactoring a lot of things. There was this storyline on Twitter telling basically that the dozens of queries were all reduced back into just a couple of queries needed on the front end. Well, that's of course, good news, but it also makes you wonder whether the MSI package was before 2.4.0, then not just really a performance hog.

PJ: It was.

Jisse:  Yeah, apparently. So, it's good that it is fixed. Well--

PJ: Have you worked with MSI a lot? 

Jisse: No, actually just a little bit, just trying to integrate things with it. But, yeah, I have to be honest, I'm a trainer, so I'm not really diving into projects myself that much, and if I do, that's always a specific area and unfortunately, MSI is still on my to-do list because I like the codebase. I like the way that things are set up in a clean way, that a domain-driven development is implemented and then IDs, like CQRS come into being, but I have to admit that once I see all of this functionality in the codes, I wonder also how difficult it is to configure everything in a real-life project. 

PJ:  Yeah. Well, we've played around with it. We did one implementation and it kind of backfired at that point because we had some synchronization issues with an ERP coming in and then you have to disable the stock reservations and they need a separate extension for that. So it got muddy at one point and we decided to take a different approach. So in the end we don't use MSI at this point in time, so I can't really say anything about the performance in 2.4. 

Jisse:  No, but you’re saying currently then you're using the old catalog inventory? 

PJ: So basically, yeah. We pull in necessary information from an ERP when we need it and where we need it, but it's not integrated in MSI. 

Jisse: So, what I wonder about all of the new features that come into Magento more and more and more is whether all of those agencies or whether all of those developers and merchants out there actually need all of those features at all. Some people do, and of course, it's a wonderful thing that MSI was developed and that there's so much opportunity suddenly with all of those modules. But there's still, I think also a lot of merchants out there that only need a simple inventory management, so basically the old catalog inventory. And now that's slowly being deprecated, which makes me wonder, like, okay, but is the community then maybe able to pick up on maintaining such a simple inventory for a longer time? I think it should be doable, but there still needs to be somebody to pick up on it. 

PJ: Yeah. I'm curious to see when MSI will completely replace the old catalog inventory module. Not sure it will eventually happen at all. 

Jisse:  No. Well, a similar story that is there, of course, is that MySQL, as a search engine has been dropped in favor of Elasticsearch. And again, I think this was clearly announced by Magento as well in all of the release notes about 2.4. So I'm not blaming them for anything, but it's more that I wonder how many merchants are actually needing this and how many merchants are just frustrated about this because they still want to use the old MySQL search. 

PJ: Yeah well, I thought the other way. I thought, “Everybody's already using Elasticsearch, let's just kill off MySQL full-text search anyway. 

Jisse: Yeah. So, on the technical side, I think it's a good ID, but I simply don't know how many merchants would still be using the old search...