Agent-Ohm is a shopping cart platform focused on speed, extensibility and logical design.

The DesignTenets guide the changes done to Magento to bring it up-to-snuff with the larger PHP community's standards.

On the right you might see that the site claims the code license is "New BSD". Well, it's not. The code is under OSL v3, per the original Magento.

FAQ (now, more than one)

1. Should I use Agent Ohm over Magento? When will Agent Ohm be production ready?

A. It's ready now. Should you use it? Well, if you don't plan on installing any 3rd party apps, or automatically trying to upgrade with the automatic downloader, and you like hacking on code and you probably would have done it anyway, then yes. Just fork the git repo, and do all your own changes in your own branch. Then you can pull the master branch, and "rebase" your changes. This basically makes patches of your changes from the old version that you started on, and tries to apply them to the current version... very nice, can't do it with SVN.

2. How much faster is it?

A. In contrived examples, where a script hits the exact same URL over and over, it is between 10-15% faster. This is not how the Internet uses your Web site though. When you hit one exact URL over and over, all the server's caching mechanisms kick in (mysql, apc, etc. (not magento's own cache)) and are able to super optimize that one section of code that executes on that one page. In the real world, people hit your site from all different pages and directions with different browsers. These types of tests are still in their preliminary but point to somewhere between 20-35% faster. When no caching is used (mysql, apc, etc. (not magento's own)) the speed up is between 20-45%.

Why use Agent Ohm?

Well, for one, the bug tracker is open to browsing. The source code is open for browsing too... you can build your own plugins off of it and also stay current without having to jump through hoops to re-branch your SVN every release.

Secondly, if you're a developer, you want to have a nice, sensible programming API. I don't feel that a system driven by magic getters and setters provides the best API to outside developers.

Why are you forking Magento?

Well, for now this is mostly just a thought-experiment in refactoring someone else's code. There are lot of changes I want to do to make the system less resource intensive, and maybe allow it to work on cheap shared hosting environments.

Why not just send patches back to Magento?

It's not feasible to make these changes as a set of patches to the original Magento. Some of the ideological changes alter a lot of the existing code base. Preliminary discussions of the changes with Magento core team members have indicated they don't want to move in that direction. There are a lot of patches which reduce configurability at the moment, until a newer system can be put in place.

Task List / Roadmap

See the TaskList page.

News

Latest git head already has 10-15% speed improvement over standard Magento 1.3.0

2000-05-14: Fixed a major security issue with running multiple store front-ends. See? if you were on Agent-Ohm, you'd already be patched.

2009-04-13: I started testing with the sample data. Running under nginx+fcgi some of the pages are 20-25% faster (both systems under nginx+fcgi).

2009-04-25: Completed task "Fix the Cache".