All Pets E-Commerce Store

TLDR: All Pets is an online store built using Magento 2, which uses LAMP stack. It is then deployed onto an unmanaged Virtual Private Server (VPS).

Technologies explained:

LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Together, they provide a proven set of software for delivering high-performance web applications. Each component contributes essential capabilities to the stack:

Linux: The operating system. Linux is a free and open source operating system (OS) that has been around since the mid-1990s. Today, it has an extensive worldwide user base that extends across industries. Linux is popular in part because it offers more flexibility and configuration options than some other operating systems.

Apache: The web server. The Apache web server processes requests and serves up web assets via HTTP so that the application is accessible to anyone in the public domain over a simple web URL. Developed and maintained by an open community, Apache is a mature, feature-rich server that runs a large share of the websites currently on the internet. 

MySQL: The database. MySQL is an open source relational database management system for storing application data. With MySQL, you can store all your information in a format that is easily queried with the SQL language. SQL is a great choice if you are dealing with a business domain that is well structured, and you want to translate that structure into the backend. MySQL is suitable for running even large and complex sites. 

PHP: The programming language. The PHP open source scripting language works with Apache to help you create dynamic web pages. You cannot use HTML to perform dynamic processes such as pulling data out of a database. To provide this type of functionality, you simply drop PHP code into the parts of a page that you want to be dynamic. 

PHP is designed for efficiency. It makes programming easier—and a bit more fun—by allowing you to write new code, hit refresh, and immediately see the resulting changes without the need for compiling.

Magento 2 is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. It uses multiple other PHP frameworks such as Laminas and Symfony. It applies the conventions of object-oriented programming and model–view–controller architecture. Magento 2 also uses the entity–attribute–value model to store data and as of version 2.4 it requires Elasticsearch for its catalog search capability. On top of that, Magento 2 introduced the Model-View-ViewModel pattern to its front-end code using the JavaScript library Knockout.js.

As the CTO of All Pets, I was the decision maker of all Software design and architecture related issues. It was a fulfilling learning journey throughout the product development. Despite LAMP stack being the older technology stack used for Web Development, it is undoubtedly one of the most crucial concepts a Software Engineer should acquire. This also sparked my interest in other technology stacks such as MERN stack and Python-Django framework.