Just before the New Year ‘TechCrunch’ featured an article about innovation driven by open source code.
It argued that big owners of licenced software such as Apple and Google are not only embracing the open source, but accept it as the inevitable shape of things to come.
Of course, Magento is open source and, as a Magento Solution Partner, we know that it is the world’s favourite ecommerce platform with more than a quarter of the market – so we thoroughly agree with that conclusion.
But Magento isn’t the only ecommerce open source show in town. Take Spree Commerce for example, which has been around for as long as Magento, but is a very different beast. Which approach will be at the heart of ecommerce innovation in the next five years?
Magento is based on PHP (which, some will remember, once stood for Personal Home Page, but is now the shortened version of PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor), which is the most popular scripting language for web development as well as general-purpose programming. That means that it is resilient and there are plenty of resources and lots of innovation out there.
Spree uses Ruby on Rails, or simply Rails, as a web application framework and is a popular storefront platform for online retailers around the world. Rails is easier to learn than PHP and is one of the fastest growing open source projects in the world. Rail developers will say that is simpler and faster to use than PHP, but there’s a trade-off with back-end functions.
Where will the home of open source innovation for ecommerce be in the future? With the depth of PHP expertise available and the popularity of Magento we are looking forward to an explosion of outstanding new features.
There’s no doubt that the pace of Rails open source development is impressive but we are confident that the scale and inspiration behind Magento mean that it will continue to be the leading solution in 2020.
Get in touch to find out what our talented team of Magento developers can offer your business.
