Question

I am a beginner in magento and am working on creating a website using magento. I have noticed that magento has a good number of apis that expose all of the functionality that I would need to create an ecommerce website. So, I would like to use magento’s apis to fetch data, but develop the UI separately without any dependencies on magento. I have found a lot of references that develop the website via magento theming, but not those where the UI is developed in a separate MVC and uses magento purely as service layer. Are there any problems/issues in my approach?

Edit: I have gained a lot of clarity on db performance issue in apis and how external caching can alleviate the issue, but I still don’t understand the underwhelming use of magento as a service layer (i.e. fueling the website by using magento’s apis), are they any other gotchas?

Answer 1

Here is how we overcame slowness in Magento APIs:

1. Created a Web service provider in J2EE, Spring MVC that acts as a proxy between Magento and end users.
2. J2EE Web service provider exposes pretty much all the APIs that Magento has but also supports JSON with REST along with SOAP & RPC.
3. J2EE Web service provider uses a document based database (MongoDB) to store a snapshot of product catalog in MongoDB.
4. J2EE Web service provider uses native MongoDB caching to serve data fast without running any expensive SQL queries.
5. To avoid dirty caching issues we created a hook in Magento Admin to push data into MongoDB whenever data changes in Magento.

This might sound like overkill to some but we have been able to achieve pretty high throughput without any slowness.