The document discusses the virtues of platform development, focusing on building applications using frameworks while solving real-world business problems. It highlights the importance of learning from established systems like Magento, adhering to best practices, and avoiding common pitfalls in coding. The author also addresses myths surrounding platform development, emphasizing the need for skilled developers in the marketplace.

1. VIRTUES OF
PLATFORM
DEVELOPMENT

2. Introduction
Phillip Jackson
Something Digital
@philwinkle
github.com/philwinkle

3. Frameworks Let You
Build ...Something.

4. Frameworks should…
• Be tasked to build large application structures
• Be lean and unopinionated
• Contain toolkits that help you solve hard
programming problems
• I need access control
• I need to talk to a database
• I need to write some stuff to cache storage

5. General-purpose libraries
form general-purpose
communities.

6. Framework
development is for really
really smart people. ..
I‟m not one of them.

7. Platform Development
Teaches You to Build Rapidly
• Platforms help you solve hard business problems
• I need a customer login form
• I need to add products to a cart
• I need to accept multiple forms of payment
• It helps you think in terms of solving real-world problems

8. Stand on the
Shoulders of
Giants

9. Everything I know I
learned from Magento

10. “Don‟t talk to strangers”
• Class types (final, abstract)
• Class/variable scope
• Private/protected

11. “Hold Mommy‟s hand”
• Factories
• Autoloaders
• Bootstrap

12. “Look both ways before
crossing the street”
• Consult the documentation
• I kid, I kid.
• For the most part, Magento obeys its own rules, follow them!
• Ask the community

13. Examples of Core „documentation‟
• Queued workers
• Indexing
• ACL
• Customer Account route/controllers
• Form validation
• Customer registration form
• Orm/Resource models
• Sales, Wishlist
• Grids
• Sales and Reports
• Reports
• Direct SQL (haha jklol) – see here:
http://magento.stackexchange.com/a/7963/336

14. “Don‟t talk with your mouth full”
• Lazy Loading
Don’t do this:
Mage::getModel(‘sales/order’)->getCollection()->load();
Do this:
Mage::getModel(‘sales/order’)->getCollection()->getFirst();
…or this:
$collection = Mage::getModel(‘sales/order’)->getCollection();
foreach($collection as $order){
//stuff
}

15. “Your face will get stuck like that”
• Dirty Hacks
• Best Practice
I‟m just going to do this:
echo $product->getMyAwesomeAttribute();
//=> null
//hack- fix it later
$myProduct = Mage::getModel(‘catalog/product’)->load($product-
>getId());
//=> ‚this is working‛

16. …cont
$collection = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')->getCollection();
$backendModel = $collection->getResource()-
>getAttribute('media_gallery')->getBackend();
foreach ($collection as $product){
//add gallery to the product
$backendModel->afterLoad($product);
}

17. “Use your manners”
• Depends
• Controller rewrites
• Observers

18. Predispatch strategy:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<global>
<events>
<controller_action_predispatch_customer_account_index>
<observers>
<myevent_this_should_be_unique>
<class>YourCompany_YourModule_Model_Observer</class>
<method>yourMethodName</method>
</myevent_this_should_be_unique>
</observers>
</controller_action_predispatch_customer_account_index>
</events>
</global>

19. “Don‟t talk back”
• Closures
• Create new closures and hand them around
• They‟re first-class functions – handy for array_walk:
array_walk($array,function(&$var){
//do stuff to $var
});

20. Don‟t do this (but it‟s fun)
Mage::register(‘closure’,function( return ‚hello world‛; ));
//later…
$closure = Mage::registry(‘closure’);
$closure();
//=>‛hello world‛
…avoiding-difficult-things-to-debug-as-a-service

21. “Use your inside voice”
• Dependency/constructor injection
LIVE DEMO (oh boy…)

22. If at first you don‟t succeed,
TRY, try again
• Exception routing patterns
Avoid:
try {
$model>doSomething();
//=>throws
} catch(Exception $e){
$this->setSomething(‘wuuuuut’);
}
if($this->getSomething()){
//….blah
}

23. Exceptions cont…
Rather:
try {
$model>doSomething();
//=>throws
} catch(Exception $e){
$session->addError($this->__(‘wuuuuut’));
}

24. “If you can‟t say something
nice, don‟t say it at all.”
• Return patterns (this is just good programming)
Avoid:
public function getMyStuff($id){
$model = Mage::getModel(‘test/test’)->load($id);
if($model->getId()){
return $model;
} else {
return false;
}
}

25. Cont…
Rather:
public function getMyStuff($id){
$model = Mage::getModel(‘test/test’)->load($id);
if(!$model){
return false;
}
return $model;
}

26. “If you can‟t say something nice,
don‟t say it at all.” (cont…)
• Return patterns (this is just good programming)
• Models return null
• Observers that error don‟t halt the next observers in the
chain

27. “Do unto others”
• Avoid joins on production sales tables
• Shard out BI queries to read slaves
• Schedule maintenance overnight
• Don‟t forget the maintenance.flag file
• Check for running tasks before executing
• Queue and batch

28. “You‟re not leaving this house dressed like
that”
• Default theme does a lot
• Catalog_Navigation is the most overridden class on the
Magento Connect marketplace!

29. “Wait 30 minutes before getting in
the POOL”
• Code pools; haha get it?
• Don‟t copy class files to app/code/local
• Override only if necessary
• Use observers liberally
• Theme fallback is awesome
• Has some limitations
• Magento 2 has major improvements
• There are extensions to help you set up child themes, etc.

30. “If you play with it you‟ll
go blind”

31. price.phtml
Don‟t bother trying to restyle price.phtml. It‟s not worth it.

32. Common myths of
platform development

33. Myths of platform development
• Platforms box you in
• I can build it better myself
• The platform is more complicated than the problem it
solves
• It‟s so complex - I don‟t know where to start

34. “Why does Magento require me to do *.*”
• Be unopinionated about simple problems
• Shipping rates
• Layout
• Display logic
• Inventory
• Be extremely opinionated about complicated problems
• Taxes
• Multi-store
• Multi-shipping
• Time zone / locale / language
• Complex discount rules
• Magento didn’t make up your crazy business rules

35. “It‟s too Zend-like”
Zend is established and secure. Where used, it steps up to the
challenge. Zend pre-existed namespaces, closures, even JSON
encoding as part of the core library.

36. “It‟s not Zend enough”
“Where is my config.ini and why do I have to write so much XML?”

37. “There‟s so much XML”
• YAML was the weird thing that Doctrine used
• JSON was the weird thing that required eval, right?
• Code generation tools make this a bit nicer
• Magento 2 is worse
• XML supported and understood by “enterprise” adopters

38. “There‟s no jQuery”
• Install any one of 5k+ plugins and I guarantee you they‟ll
install jQuery for you
• Learning prototype is actually a blast - consider it a
challenge

39. “The performance is lousy”
• It‟s gotten better
• It‟s not meant to be run on a shared server at GoDaddy or
Hostgator
• Plugins
• Hardware
• Full Page Cache
• Varnish

40. “Magento is overengineered for what I
need”
• Magento Go?
• OK but seriously, Magento Go.
• OK - fine. There are a ton of options out there - check out
Shopify.

41. Zend is old because
namespaces and IOC / DI

42. “It‟s too complex”
• Fair enough.
http://magento.stackexchange.com/a/4700/336

43. Success == Recognizing and
filling a need in the marketplace

44. Conclusion

45. There is a huge need for developers. There are practically
no Magento developers who can hit the ground running. [It
takes weeks] to ramp a new hire up.
eBay [paraphrased]

46. Come support “MageOverflow”
http://magento.stackexchange.com
Fastest Answers:
https://twitter.com/kalenjordan/status/385062073475923968

47. THANK YOU

48. We’re hiring!!
Jon Tudhope – Director of Software

49. Q&A