I saw that you guys added composer into Magento 2.0, does this affect the development environment in the way I can use composer and install other php packages or is it just a part of the main Magento framework in general?

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You can use Composer as you would in any other project by adding necessary libraries through “composer require” or in the root “composer.json.” Magento’s use of composer is independent of other PHP packages which may use composer.