Performance, performance, performance
While I’m proud of how great Commerce were in 2014, there are still areas where we need to improve. One of those is performance.
We paid attentions to important parts of the system, where customers demand the most. And the results were, quite impressive. From 8.11 to 8.15, many profiling and improvements had been done, and the results are quite expensive: loading cart performance increased 4 times, loading Entry with CatalogEntryResponseGroup.Full performance increased 3 times, etc.
However, the biggest change – “rewritten” catalog system, had to wait for Commerce 9.
Commerce 9 was, in no doubts, big release, in term of changes. And it surely is the biggest in term of performance gain. With the changes in underlying catalog system database, the performance gain is, massive. In some areas, the change is a whopping 10 fold, and other areas, 2-4x times faster. If you are still on Commerce 8.x, while it was a great product at its time, you are highly recommended to upgrade to latest 9.x version. Many customers’ve done it, and they’re more than happy with the performance. 2015 was the year which I can finally be happy with overall performance of Commerce. Of course, there are still rooms for improvements and we are not perfect yet, but let’s open a champagne for the performance gain we got.
New promotion system
I am OK with the old promotion system as an editor/administrator, but I’m no fan of it as a developer. When a bug is reported by the QA, I can follow the bug report to re-produce the bug for investigation, but when it comes to write an integration test to verify the correctness of bugfix (and of course, prevent the same mistake to be happenned in the future), I usually grin my teeth. So I’m all in favors for the new promotion system, when I can easily write tests for my fixes, and even unit tests (woo hoo). And did I mention a much more intuiative and well-designed UI?