Wikipedia
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. The software was originally developed by Varien Inc., a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California, with assistance from volunteers.
Varien published the first general-availability release of the software on March 31, 2008. Roy Rubin, former CEO of Varien, later sold a substantial share of the company to eBay, which eventually completely acquired and then spun off the company.
According to the research conducted by aheadWorks in May 2015, Magento's market share among the 30 most popular e-commerce platforms is about 29.8%.
On November 17, 2015, Magento 2.0 was released, with an aim to provide new ways to heighten user engagement, smooth navigation, conversion rates and overall revenue generation, it has well-organized business user tools speed up build up time and enhances productivity. Table locking issues have purportedly been considerably reduced, Improved Page Caching and also allows in streamlining Guest checkout process for existing users, Enterprise-grade scalability, improved performance and better code base are some of the touted benefits of newer Magento version.
Magento employs the MySQL/ MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework. It applies the conventions of object-oriented programming and model–view–controller architecture. Magento also uses the entity–attribute–value model to store data. On top of that, Magento 2 introduced the Model-View-ViewModel pattern to its front-end code using the JavaScript library Knockout.js.