#bestmagentodevelopment

During the Imagine 2018 conference back in April, Magento announced the release of Magento 2.3 by the end of 2018.

After much of a wait,

Magento

has released the Magento 2.3 on November 28, 2018.

It has been almost a year since the last major release of

Magento 2.2 but Magento 2.3

has brought a ton of new core features with a lot of smaller optimizations.

11 New Features Magento 2.3 Introduced

Magento 2.3 introduces tons of new core features such as –

Progressive Web App (PWA) Studio

GraphQL Support

Declarative DB Schema

Asynchronous and Bulk Web API

Elasticsearch

PHP 7.2 Support

Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)

WYSIWYG Upgrade

Page Builder

Cache-Management

Google reCAPTCHA and Two Factor Authentication

Let’s have a closer look at them.

Progressive Web Applications (PWA) Studio

What are Progressive Web Applications (PWA)?

Progressive Web Applications (PWA)

is the future of

web app development

. PWA with

Android

Instant Apps is the next advancement in web industry after Responsive Web Design.

Progressive Web Apps uses progressive enhancements that offers features similar to a

native mobile application

.

Progressive Web Apps

and Android Instant Apps combined together lets you create beautiful apps with material design and animations without the need of installing them on any device.

Have you ever encountered a popup while browsing a website on mobile device saying “ADD TO HOME SCREEN”? When you click on the button, the application installs itself in the background. Now that application shows in your app drawer and offers the experience of a native mobile application.

The app was downloaded from a web application without seeing the face of a Play Store or App Store. Isn’t it great!!!

These PWA apps offer offline access to the content without the need of an internet connection.

Magento PWA Studio

The Magento PWA Studio is a collection of tools that allows development, deployment, and maintenance of a PWA application on the top of Magento 2.

Magento PWA Studio contains modern libraries and tools such as –

PWA-buildpack – Collection of main development tools

peregrine – Collection of UI Components

PWAs are normally based on JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue.js, AngularJS for dealing with the frontend of the application; and communicate with Magento 2 by means of REST API. This methodology is otherwise called Headless Magento.

GraphQL capabilities are required with Magento PWA Studio which is only available in Magento 2.3 release.

GraphQL

What is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a query language for APIs. It is one of the modern technology to build and query API.

In simple words, GraphQL is a syntax that addresses how to ask for data from a server and helps in loading data to a client.

GraphQL Offers –

It gives a chance to the client to determine precisely what information it needs.

It makes easier to collect information from numerous sources.

It uses a type of system to describe data.

Magento GraphQL Support

One of the biggest moves in Magento 2.3 is the introduction of GraphQL API Language. GraphQL is more powerful, flexible and efficient than the REST API.

Magento 2.3 executes GraphQL as an elective API endpoint in addition to REST API and SOAP API.

GraphQL opens up data retrieval possibilities for PWAs by allowing to request precise information that you require. It means that you can get a smaller amount of data more efficiently with the lesser number of API requests.

It allows Magento PWA to be quick even on slow mobile network connections.

Declarative DB Schema

In the previous Magento version, altering schema of a Magento database can be accomplished using InstallSchema and UpgradeSchema classes.

However, Magento 2.3 implements it using declarative database schema. In Declarative Database Schema, instead of defining database structures and changes with install scripts, altering schema is accomplished using an XML file.

Magento converts the XML file into SQL queries and runs them.

The major advantage of using Declarative Database Schema is rollback support. Now you can easily rollback to a previous version of a module or functionality.

Declarative Database Schema also greatly simplifies the Magento installation and upgrade process.

Asynchronous API Requests

Asynchronous API enables Magento to process a large number of API requests asynchronously without waiting for server response.

Thus it offers a huge advantage over traditional API approach, where the client has to wait for a significant amount of time to get a response until all the requests have been processed.

The video demonstrates a demo of the working of asynchronous API over message queue.

Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch is an open-source, scalable, enterprise-level search engine built on Apache Lucene.

Elasticsearch offers powerful and fast searches and is commonly used for log analytics, business analytics, text-based searches and more.

With Magento 2.3, Elasticsearch is now available to Magento Open Source users while previously being exclusive to Magento Commerce.

Elasticsearch will offer merchants to integrate powerful search engine capabilities in their webshops.

Support for PHP 7.2

PHP 7.2 support has been added to Magento 2.3 thereby offering more stability, security and enhanced performance. As PHP 7.2 removed the support for PHP encryption module ‘mcrypt’, now Magento 2.3 has moved from mcrypt to libsodium for password hashing.

Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)

Another addition to Magento 2.3 is the Multi-Source Inventory (MSI).

Now merchants can manage their inventory without the need for third-party extensions.

MSI enables merchants to manage inventory from multiple locations by adding their physical warehouses in the Magento system.

Also, MSI improved the checkout performance by adding a reservation system to the checkout process. Now instead of decrementing the stock from the inventory at the time of the checkout process, it is reserved within the new table structure.

It helps the unnecessary database locking and also helps in keeping the inventory amount up-to-date during peak order times.

WYSIWYG Upgrade

Magento 2.3 has upgraded the TinyMCE editor from version 3 to version 4 introducing new enhancements. Widgets, Media Gallery are now implemented as plugins.

Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF)

July 30, 2019

For any Magento store owner, it has become very competitive to survive in the retail ecosystem. So it is very much important to do continuous monitoring of your market and make changes in your Magento website.

These changes allow companies to quickly respond to the changing retail ecosystem. But while making any changes to your eCommerce store, it becomes important to ensure smooth user experience.

To achieve this, a thorough Magento testing needs to be followed involving user behavior simulation for proper performance evaluation. If the changes are very frequent, then the old manual testing techniques become redundant. To overcome this scenario, Magento has introduced Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF).

Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF) was introduced by Tom Erskine at Mage Test Fest. MFTF has already seen 2 major releases and the latest version available till today is 2.3.12.

Before, getting to know about the MFTF (Magento functional Testing framework), we should be aware of the Functional Testing framework.

   What is Functional Testing Framework(FTF)?

FTF is an open-source cross-platform solution where we can develop functional tests for a Magento application. These tests can be performed at any time with the options of –

Running a single test independently

Running multiple tests together as a test suite

Running all available tests in one-go

Tests usually cover the functionality of a business entity. The goal is to find discrepancies between expected and real behavior of the entity.

What is the need for functional testing?

Magento 2 offers a very complex architecture and it becomes very difficult to manually test everything. Also, manual testing can result in human mistakes due to complex flows.

Although unit testing and integration testing can cover the whole code but still don’t guarantee that everything will execute in the same way on different devices and browsers.

What is Magento Functional Testing Framework (MFTF)?

MFTF is a set of ready-made tests that check if a Magento 2 system functionality runs as expected. MFTF is based on selenium, codeception, allure, etc.

5 Key Features of MFTF –

Flexible, because of modularity support.

Customizability, for existing tests.

Informative, because of the reporting tool.

Suitable, because of test suites.

Compatible, because of web driver selection

Benefits of MFTF over Unit Tests

XML

MFTF tests are written in XML, so, you no longer need to learn PHP to write tests.

Merging

Merging is the most beneficial feature of MFTF. For example, we add a new field to the existing registration form of Magento website.

In the case of unit testing, we need to write test cases again for the complete page but in MFTF, we just need to provide extra attribute details and rest we can use the same test case code from the core.

Environment setup for MFTF

PHP version

Upgrade your PHP version according to Magento instance which you are using. In our case, we will be using Magento 2.3, and our PHP version is 7.2.13

Composer

Install the composer on your environment. Please follow the below link to install composer.

https://getcomposer.org/download/

Java

You need to install Java on your system to run the Selenium server.

Selenium server

Now install selenium jar file on your instance, which will help you to run MFTF test cases.Download the jar file and place it in the Magento root directory or some server (depends upon your requirement). Please follow the below link for download –

https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/

Web Browser Driver

You need browser driver (Mozilla, Chrome, Safari) to run your test cases. In our case, we are using the Google Chrome Driver. Follow the below link for download –

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads

Step by step guide to setup Magento Functional Testing Framework

Step 1 – Fresh Install Magento 2.3

I hope you are already aware of Magento 2 installation. But still, if you are new please refer to the following link for Magento 2 installation –

https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.3/install-gde/install-quick-ref.html

You can also download the Magento 2.3 from here and just extract it to your localhost directory. After that just hit the Magento directory on your browser and complete the Magento setup.

Step 2 – Install dependencies

We need to install the MFTF. Please follow below command –

composer install -d dev/tests/acceptance/

Step 3 – Build the project

In the Magento project root, run –

vendor/bin/mftf build:project

Step 4 – Edit environmental settings

In the [Magento_Root]/dev/tests/acceptance/ directory, edit the .env file to match your system.

vim dev/tests/acceptance/.env

Specify the following parameters, which are required for tests –

MAGENTO_BASE_URL – Must contain a domain name of the Magento instance that will be tested. Ex: http://127.0.0.1/magento2mftf/

MAGENTO_BACKEND_NAME: must contain the relative path for the Admin area. Ex: admin

MAGENTO_ADMIN_USERNAME: must contain the username required for authorization in the Admin area. Ex: admin

MAGENTO_ADMIN_PASSWORD: must contain the user password required for authorization in the Admin area. Ex: admin12345

Step 5 – Enable the Magento CLI commands

In the [Magento_Root]/dev/tests/acceptance directory, run the following command to enable the MFTF to send Magento CLI commands to your Magento instance.

cp dev/tests/acceptance/.htaccess.sample dev/tests/acceptance/.htaccess

Step 6 – Generate and run tests

To run tests, you need a running Selenium server and mftf commands.

Run the Selenium server in another terminal

Run the Selenium server in the terminal. Both selenium jar file and browser driver should be on the same place. In our case, both reside in the Magento root directory.

For example, the following commands run the Selenium server for Google Chrome –

cd <path_to_directory_with_selenium_server_and_webdriver>/Java -Dwebdriver.chrome.driver=chromedriver -jar selenium-server-standalone-3.14.0.jar