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Ask HN: Is anyone interested in Node.js based alternative to Magento?
Magento is based on PHP which makes it need more infrastructure to serve more users. People also use Wordpress, Joomla for setting up ecommerce sites. Are there developers or customers who might be interested in having access to open source Node.js ecommerce solution along the lines of Magento, but also updated in terms of functionality for today's world where buyers lurk on apps like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.
- wallenje1 12y agoOf course, this would be extremely revolutionary. Is there one in the works. On a technical level, are yo a single developer because the code needed isnt a joke. The most underdeveloped php ecommerce frameworks are opencart and prestashop, and even they are pretty well polished.
- vishalchandra 12y agoTeam of four (all very comfortable in Node.js, delivered several products in the past) + a customer. We will manage to build something. Need to figure out how much sense it makes to make that extra effort to be customizable, extendable, etc. That approach won't work if other Node.js devs are not interested in taking up the code and extending and customizing it in future.
- nailer 12y agoA Ghost eCommerce plugin would be useful.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mhoad 12y agoI'd love to see something like this but as already mentioned, building out a serious e-commerce platform from scratch is a lot of work.
- canterburry 12y agoI think you are asking the wrong crowd and possibly the wrong quesion. The prime consumers of any eCommerce platform are business users, those who work with inventory, sales, returns etc. If they prefer one package to another, they aren't even going to consider what language it was written in. They plain don't care and they will tell the coder guy which one they want.
- tehwebguy 12y agoAgreed, I don't want to sound like a hater but I think that the product is so much more than just a piece of software. There are also thousands of extensions for Magento. What about looking at the gap in between a PayPal button and something like Magento?
- vonnik 12y agoI think he's asking the right crowd, because the only people who care about whether a platform is in PHP or node.js are other devs. And it's also the right question, because there may be devs who would be better served by a node.js tool than by Magento, which is a bloated and outdated piece of software.
- canterburry 12y agoWhat I am trying to say is that the dev person's preference is one of the least important criteria when a business evaluates an e-commerce package.
- vishalchandra 12y agoYes, business owners have learnt that Shopify is nice and if you need your own solution then Magento is a good way to go forward. We are focused on putting together a community of only 100 Node.js dev teams who have or believe that they will have ecommerce customers open to using Node.js (and only worried about functionality) and are willing to work together to deliver better quality, easier to manage large scalable ecommerce sites. We are the first such dev team, looking for 99 others.
- nasmorn 12y agoMagento has it's problems but resource usage under scale probably isn't on most peoples mind. Usually your ecommerce traffic is worth many magnitudes more than the computation cost. Reasonable response times for a single request would be nice though
- vonnik 12y agotrycelery.com is an e-commerce platform based on Node.js.
- halisaurus 12y ago2% + CC processing fees? That's expensive. Also, this is a pre-order platform. Not really a 1-to-1 with Magento
- vonnik 12y agoYes, and Magento is many many thousands of dollars in engineering costs. Celery is two lines of code you paste into a website. Or it's an API. Which is the platform, and it takes live orders. It just so happens that many of its clients started post-Kickstarter with pre-orders.
- blowenstein93 12y agoIt looks like it specializes in pre-orders, but they also support real-time charging.
- booop 12y agoOver here, you will find people interested in a node.js alternative to anything.
- dennybritz 12y ago<3
- o_____________o 12y agoYes, Magento is obscene in resource use. I've seen multiple clients sink under the burden of optimizing their stores.
- mgmeyers 12y agoYes
- _random_ 12y agoNode.js seems to be fading away. Perhaps something like Golang would be a better alternative?
- genericacct 12y agoI'll take this as a joke until i see some data. Absolute numbers please, not trends.
- MalcolmDiggs 12y agoMaybe it's opposite day?
- _random_ 12y agoThis is just a subjective perception of the sentiment. In the end of the day it's just another tool that fits a specific purpose. Besides, didn't the top package contributor leave recently? https://medium.com/code-adventures/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3e52b https://medium.com/code-adventures/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3...
- MalcolmDiggs 12y agoYes definitely interested. If you get the ball rolling please do share the Github.
- vishalchandra 12y agoThanks will do. By mid-September.
- gannisk 12y agoWorthy try,but given the Node developer community is small, it would take good amount of time to hit mainstream traction,case in example : Spreecommerce built on RoR
- xorax 12y agoYes I am too. But I think nodejs still misses some things to be a great language, at most the synchronous way. Some people try to make it by implementing the same syntax as in C# (async/await) or by finding others ways (like coffee script try with defer). But finaly we still have with so much spaghetti... And for example, just try to think about how many levels of callback you will need to have to write only the Config model of Magento : it's insame. So, at this time, I don't think that the language is good enought without a transcompilator like coffeescript (even I don't like the idea) or a strong runtime lib (which one?). And from that will depends the success.