Aimeos 2019.01 major release

The new beta version contains a lot of improvements and focuses on:

• Even more performance
• Developer experience
• Code cleanup

Performance improvements

Aimeos is already known as ultra fast e-commerce solution for Laravel, Symfony, SlimPHP, TYPO3 and Flow/NeosCMS even for complex requirements. This release pushes the limits teared down by Aimeos #gigacommerce further with render times of 20ms and below if content caching is enabled. Without caching, response times are exceptional too compared to other shop systems and in the 2019.01 release, we reduced that time further.

First, we denormalized tables that use types, so the type code is now stored directly instead of the type ID. This saves several database queries per request. Additionally, it’s possible to retrieve related data for e.g. products filtered by type:

$manager->searchItems( $filter, ['text', 'price', 'product' => ['suggestion'] );

This fetches related products of type “suggestion” only instead of all related products. Especially for shops with many relations, this can be a huge performance improvement if components can’t be cached.

PHP 7.3 promises another huge performance improvement and we are testing that version every time. Unfortunately, there’s a bug in PHP 7.3 with prevents production usage yet. It seems that the PHP developers over-optimized opcode caching so PHP 7.3 produces wrong results: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=77310

Simplifications for developers

One of the major goals for this Aimeos release was to simplify interfaces so the first steps for new developers are easier. As a result, creating managers, controllers and clients requires only:

$manager = \Aimeos\MShop::create( $context, 'product' );
$cntl = \Aimeos\Controller\Frontend::create( $context, 'catalog' );
$client = \Aimeos\Client\Html::create( $context, 'catalog/lists' );

Items with relations are fetched recursively now and a decorator limits the recursion depth to two levels. The allowed depth is configurable like everything else in Aimeos. This allows you to get all releated data you need at one without fetching and merging data from several calls to searchItems():

$products = $manager->searchItems( $filter, ['product', 'price', 'text] );

For bundle and selection products, the items in the result list contains the bundled and variant articles including prices, texts and related products.

Also, all newly created items have the status “enabled” by default and must be explicitly disabled if required. This saves many calls to “setStatus()” especially when implementing a new importer. The frontend controllers allow multiple category IDs for filtering so it’s possible to search for
products in multiple categories with one method call.

Code cleanups

Finally, a lot of old code has been removed due to the switch to document oriented managment of items. Especially in the index managers and the filter criteria implementation was some code left after the changes required to use ElasticSearch natively.

The 2019.x releases are the last ones that will support PHP 5 as 5.6 isn’t maintained any more since this year. You should use PHP 7 nevertheless to get the best performance.

For a full list of backward incompatible changes, please have a look at the Wiki article. BC breaking changes in 2019.01 are listed up to 2018-12-31:

https://aimeos.org/docs/Developers/Changelog/2019