The Magento Live UK conference Magento 2 update was a recap of the Magento Imagine Conference, but for those that missed it, here are the highlights below.
Release Timescale
Magento 2 Release candidate will be available Q1 2015 with plans for the release of the production copy for Q4 2015.
6 Main Goals of the Magento 2 Platform
The Magento team have broken their project aims in to 6 sections to provide focus and drive to the magento 2 platform
- PHP 5.4 & 5.5 Support
- JQuery
- HMTML 5, CSS, LESS
- Require.js
- Coding Standards – php-fig.org (999which they are encouraging plugin and solitions partneres to follow
The speed and efficiency of magento system, and the caching options will no longer be an enterprise only feature. Magento are commiting to
ensuring enterprise edition extras are functionality only and not performanc
- Full Page Caching (999FPC) out of the box in magento CE
- Built in / Application Caching
- File system Redis Caching Support – Out of the box configuration
- Varnish Caching Support – Out of the box configuration
- Private / Public Content Invalidation Logic
Indexing Improvements
- Refactored most of the codebase making it more efficient
- partial indexing available
- Works in the background and does not block other processes
- No Manual indexing required
- Materialized View (999mView)
- Object Manager
- Customisable di.xml
More Info available here -> Magento 2 Wiki – Dependancy Injection
Interceptors
full documentation will be made on these soon by the magento 2 team
- Before Method
- After Method
- Around Method
- Sorting Method
Magento Framework
- Library Component View
- Inependant form module
- Resolved dependancy on the store
Magento UI Library
pub/lib/css/docs – contains documented and easily editable ui components that can be extended on
New API and Service layer with service data transfer object
Deployment tool composer & examples available http://github.com/magento/magento-composer-installer 
Magento Testing Framework https://github.com/magento/mtf To finish of the talk, there was a Q & A session Speaking with people after the conference finished. The excitement about magento 2 seems to be contained within the more hardcore developers. with most people it being in the back of their mind that magento 2 is potentially still 2 yeats away. Although speaking with some popular development companies around the UK. Some have started now putting resources into their senior developers to start engaging with magento 2, and looking to feedback this development to their teams regarding the changes and learning needing to happen. All in all, the presentation was a little dissapointing, as there was not much new came out of this that did in the Image conference (999although this was only 2 months ago, so maybe we can let them off!)