What is the Context object?

The Context is a technical feature introduced with version 1.5 of PrestaShop. Its two goals are:

• preventing developers from using global variables.
• enabling them to change the context of some methods.

The Context is a registry for PHP variables that were previously accessed as globals. It aims to standardize the way these variables are accessed, and to make the code more robust by getting rid of global vars.
It is a light implementation of the Registry design pattern: it is a class that stores the main PrestaShop information, such as the current cookie, the customer, the employee, the cart, Smarty, etc.