Category Archives: General

PHP 7 New Features

  • Scalar type hints
  • Return type declarations
  • Anonymous classes
  • The Closure::call() method
  • Generator delegation
  • Generator return expressions
  • The null coalesce operator
  • The space ship operator
  • Throwables
  • Level support for the dirname() function
  • The Integer division function
  • Uniform variable syntax

Extension Attributes

Extension attributes are new in Magento 2. They are used to extend functionalities and often use more complex data types than custom attributes. Extension Attributes are used to allow for customization of the strict Service Contracts. These attributes do not appear on the GUI.

Third-party developers cannot change the API Data interfaces defined in the Magento Core code. However, most of these entities have a feature called extension attributes. Check the interface for the methods getExtensionAttributes() and setExtensionAttributes() to determine if they are available for the entity.

Public interfaces

A public interface is a set of code that third-party developers can call, implement, or build as a plug-in. Magento guarantees that this code will not change in subsequent releases without a major version change.

Public interfaces for a module are marked with @api annotation.

Service contracts

Magento is a modular system that enables third-party developers to customize and overwrite core parts of its framework. This flexibility, however, comes at a price. Business logic tends to leak across the layers of the Magento system, which manifests as duplicated and inconsistent code.

Merchants might be reluctant to upgrade Magento because customized extensions that they have purchased might not be compatible with new versions of Magento. Also, Magento and third-party developers can find it difficult to track and report the dependencies that customized extensions have on other extensions.

To address these issues, the Magento system introduces service contracts.

A service contract is a set of PHP interfaces that are defined for a module. A service contract includes data interfaces, which preserve data integrity, and service interfaces, which hide business logic details from service requestors such as controllers, web services, and other modules.

If developers define data and service interfaces according to a set of design patterns, the result is a well-defined, durable API that other modules and third-party extensions can implement through Magento models and resource models.

Magento 2.3: Error Assigning Related Products

check the following tables in your DB:

catalog_product_link_attribute and catalog_product_link_type

If those are empty, you need to run the following SQL queries:

INSERT INTO catalog_product_link_attribute (product_link_attribute_id, link_type_id, product_link_attribute_code, data_type) VALUES
(1, 1, ‘position’, ‘int’),
(2, 4, ‘position’, ‘int’),
(3, 5, ‘position’, ‘int’),
(4, 3, ‘position’, ‘int’),
(5, 3, ‘qty’, ‘decimal’);

INSERT INTO catalog_product_link_type (link_type_id, code) VALUES
(1, ‘relation’),
(3, ‘super’),
(4, ‘up_sell’),
(5, ‘cross_sell’);

Cluster

A cluster is the group of computing machines that can individually run the software. Clusters are typically utilized to achieve high availability for server software.

Clustering is used in many types of servers for high availability.

App Server Cluster – An app server cluster is the group of machines that can run an application server that can be reliably utilized with a minimum of downtime.

Database Server Cluster – A database server cluster is the group of machines that can run a database server that can be reliably utilized with a minimum of downtime.

Scalability

Scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of load by adding more resources. The adding of resource can be done in two ways

Scaling Up – This involves adding more resources to the existing nodes. For example, adding more RAM, Storage or processing power.

Scaling Out – This involves adding more nodes to support more users.

Any of the approaches can be used for scaling up/out an application, however,r the cost of adding resources (per user) may change as the volume increases. If we add resources to the system It should increase the ability of the application to take more load in a proportional manner of added resources.

An ideal application should be able to serve high level of load in fewer resources. However, in a practical, linearly scalable system may be the best option achievable.

Poorly designed applications may have a really high cost on scaling up/out since it will require more resources/user as the load increases.

High Availability

Having better service capacity with high availability and low latency is mission critical for almost all businesses.

Availability means the ability of the application used to access the system, If a user cannot access the application, it is assumed unavailable. High Availability means the application will be available, without interruption.

Achieving high availability for an application is not always an easy task. Using redundant server nodes with clustering is a common way to achieve a higher level of availability in web applications.

Availability is commonly expressed as a percentage of uptime in a given year.