
Ask HN: Is anyone interested in Node.js based alternative to Magento? - vishalchandra
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&#x27;s world where buyers lurk on apps like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram.
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canterburry
I 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.

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vonnik
I 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node.js tool than by Magento, which is a bloated and outdated piece of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.

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canterburry
What 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.

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xorax
Yes 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.

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booop
Over here, you will find people interested in a node.js alternative to
anything.

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dennybritz
<3

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mhoad
I'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.

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wallenje1
Of 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.

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vishalchandra
Team 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.

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nasmorn
Magento 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

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gannisk
Worthy 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

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o_____________o
Yes, Magento is obscene in resource use. I've seen multiple clients sink under
the burden of optimizing their stores.

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_random_
Node.js seems to be fading away. Perhaps something like Golang would be a
better alternative?

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genericacct
I'll take this as a joke until i see some data. Absolute numbers please, not
trends.

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_random_
This 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-4ba9e7f3...](https://medium.com/code-
adventures/farewell-node-js-4ba9e7f3e52b)

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MalcolmDiggs
Yes definitely interested. If you get the ball rolling please do share the
Github.

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vishalchandra
Thanks will do. By mid-September.

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nailer
A Ghost eCommerce plugin would be useful.

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vonnik
trycelery.com is an e-commerce platform based on Node.js.

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halisaurus
2% + CC processing fees? That's expensive. Also, this is a pre-order platform.
Not really a 1-to-1 with Magento

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vonnik
Yes, 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.

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mgmeyers
Yes

