Symfony

2 Benefits of using Symfony for System Integrations

utadmin — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 17:59:20 +0000

2 Benefits of using Symfony for System Integrations

What digital infrastructure are you choosing to invest in this year? Are you upgrading the shop floor control system? Perhaps the inventory system you’re using needs a total revamp because you’re adding new products or acquired a new company. Or maybe your fulfillment and shipping platform is due for an upgrade to keep up with consumer expectations.

Before you invest millions, retrain your staff, and lose productivity due to confusion, consider extending the life of your current systems using custom enhancements built in Symfony.

While Symfony is an emerging technology in the United States, it is already widely used in Europe and has a large global support network. At Unleashed, we are the exclusive North American partner of the framework’s creators–SensioLabs.

Not only can a Symfony-driven custom application extend the life of your existing platforms, it can enable the creation of an easier-to-use interface and connect systems across your enterprise to allow for better data sharing and operational efficiency.

We’ve spent more than 15 years creating solutions that meet our client’s business objectives. The ability to use this proven, large-scale framework to integrate legacy systems (ERP, CRM, AMS and more), create entirely new applications and help our clients leverage data is no different.

Streamlined and Customized Data Sharing Across Internal Platforms for Informed Decision-Making

Data, when used thoughtfully and with the right tools, drives good decisions. According to Forbes, data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to acquire customers than their peers. And Forrester reports that Data-driven companies are 58% more likely to beat revenue goals than those who are not focused on data.

If your data is stored in disparate systems and is difficult to access, its value diminishes.

The solution? We recommend using Symfony as a foundational system to build a custom data aggregation platform unique to your needs.

As an open-source PHP language, Symfony can connect with nearly any platform (modern or legacy) and extract meaningful information that can then be imported into other systems that use a completely separate base language. In addition, it can help bridge gaps between existing open-source and proprietary platforms that historically don’t play nice directly with each other.

Keeping Legacy Systems in Place Reduces Capital Expense

If you could find a way to maintain the status quo for your frontline staff, but still invest in efficiency improvements, would you? If you could choose to invest in both “necessary” AND “nice to have” opportunities in the same year, would you? If you could avoid changing your entire outdated asset tracking system by instead adding an application that helps it communicate with more modern systems, would you?

Symfony-driven applications can offer you those solutions. When planned and executed correctly, these custom apps can deliver new functionalities that leverage your existing digital platform –further extending the shelf-life. This approach saves money by increasing the utilization of expensive assets and avoiding a costly new investment.

There are times when legacy systems are too far gone for their shelf life to be extended. However, we recommend bringing our digital strategy team in to help you explore your options before making a major investment that may or may not pay off.

What This Means for You

This cutting-edge framework has nearly unlimited use cases. An example?

If there are steps in your sales or order fulfillment process that you believe can be streamlined using modern or custom applications, we can use Symfony to build custom APIs and workflows that automate the process. An application like this could seamlessly move order details from one platform to the next, following your custom process requirements and giving you visibility each step of the way.

We’ll unpack applications like this and more in upcoming blogs.

If you want to be on the leading edge or simply want to modernize your legacy systems to create better data sharing and business efficiencies, let's have a conversation.

utadmin Fri, 12/09/2022 - 12:59

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Fri, 12/09/2022 - 12:00

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Unleashed

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2 Benefits of using Symfony for System Integrations

Unleashed Technologies Chosen as Silver Partner by SensioLabs

utadmin — Wed, 20 May 2020 20:18:12 +0000

Unleashed Technologies Chosen as Silver Partner by SensioLabs utadmin Wed, 05/20/2020 - 16:18

Unleashed Technologies Chosen as Silver Partner by SensioLabs

After Symfony’s record-breaking 500 million downloads, SensioLabs has decided to branch out from their European roots and plant an office in the United States in order to take Symfony to the next level. SensioLabs, the creator of the Open Source Symfony framework and professional services provider, has chosen Unleashed to be its premier and first partner on the East Coast.

This partnership will provide support and expertise from both organizations to advance the use of Symfony here in the United States. It will also allow Unleashed to expand our capabilities for clients and enter new markets.

Unleashed and SensioLabs will be seen together at the [php]world 2016 conference in November to advocate the Symfony framework for PHP applications.

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Web development

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Symfony

Symfony Development Services

utadmin — Mon, 18 May 2020 17:25:40 +0000

Symfony Development Services utadmin Mon, 05/18/2020 - 13:25

Content Management Systems: Open Source Vs. Proprietary

amccoy — Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:54:14 +0000

Content Management Systems: Open Source Vs. Proprietary

There is a death coming to proprietary content management systems. For the longest time, open source solutions were locked out of the mid to enterprise markets as many people questioned the “enterprise” nature of the solution. Was it capable of supporting some of the world’s largest enterprises?

The truth is open source is more than capable and in many instances, the best option for organizations looking to maximize their investment online. Today we’re seeing platforms like Drupal, Magento, and WordPress take over some of the largest web properties on the internet. We see their presence in the government, private sector, associations, and much more.

How can we know if this is true? Well, data is a great place to start. Let’s look at what different trusted sources around the world are telling us about the usage of these different systems. For this, I’m going to leverage free sources that are common browser plug-ins that people may be familiar with. Those sources are BuiltWith and Wappalyzer. It’s important to realize that this data is inclusive of only what people visit for the most part as the browser plug-in reports back to each of these services. While we can’t say it’s the be-all and end-all of data sources, it certainly has a great amount of data for us to point in a specific direction.

Wappalyzer Data

According to the Wappalyzer portal, you’ll see that the top 3 CMS recorded are open source solutions including Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla!.

For many years, Joomla! ruled over all other open source content management systems. However, over the past five to six years, we’ve seen the market track away from that platform in a dramatic fashion while Drupal and WordPress have experienced explosive growth through constant re-investments back into the community and platforms themselves. Drupal has taken larger organizations by storm with its ability to manage complex and highly dynamic web properties that create seamless experiences for its users. WordPress has absolutely conquered the small website and small business market with its fast-to-get-online interface and streamlined administrative interface.

What deserves the most attention from this list is the fact that no proprietary CMS is in the top three and the ones featured on this list (most notably Squarespace and Wix) are meant for very small scale website presences. You do not see the presence of Ektron (now Episerver), SiteCore, or Adobe AEM on this list.

Built With Data

For the BuiltWith portion, I pulled the CMS Usage Statistics that present themselves in a different format for your review.

We can expect the data set to be disparate from one another since different groups of people use either BuiltWith or Wappalyzer and each tool catalogs based on the user’s browsing history. Even though the percentage values for the different solutions may vary, it is quite obvious that there is consistency in the top solutions which are mainly comprised of Drupal and WordPress.

Turning away from this data is hard even if you don’t like what it’s telling you. Drupal has proven to satisfy the enterprise market need and WordPress has proven its handle on small businesses. So what does this mean for proprietary web solutions?

What Does Gartner Say?

There is a body out there that says “Who’s Who” in the enterprise space and that is Gartner, the world's leading information technology research and advisory company. You’ll find that there is a clear line of progression for open source in Gartner research. For the sake of clarity, Acquia is home to the creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. So Drupal is named in accordance with that company. It’s important to remember this solution is free to the world.

In 2015, Acquia was ranked fourth overall in a pack with several other proprietary solutions.

Just one year later in 2016, we see that Acquia jumps to the top three, clearly separating itself from the pack while other content management systems have left the quadrant entirely.

That seems pretty ‘enterprise’ to me when Acquia stands alongside with SiteCore and Adobe AEM.

Final Thoughts

There is a place and need for proprietary solutions; however, the fluid nature of the web is causing these options to become less appealing. They lose in the ability to add features as quickly in line with consumer expectations. They also have smaller teams which makes keeping up with security threats difficult. Most importantly, proprietary solutions stifle creative website building due to the fact that only select vendors can work with these platforms and the purchasing client never really owns any aspect of their own solution.

If you couple these major business challenges along with the fact that each platform in the proprietary space worth talking about requires an annual license that is almost always licensed per server, clients could be spending $45,000 to $500,000 per year just for the privilege of using these systems.

While I thoroughly expect that there are many who do not agree with my assessment of the market, I don’t see how these proprietary systems can thrive in a market place in which open source solutions are providing more robust capabilities out of the box. If you’re going to develop into your website and add the business-critical functions that make you unique, is there a need to pay for the privilege anymore?

Markets change and this one now belongs to the open source systems of the world. So says the government, financial institutions, professional sports, entertainment, and many more. Perhaps you just watched The GRAMMYs? Yep, built on Drupal.

amccoy Wed, 03/22/2017 - 12:54

Publication date

Wed, 03/22/2017 - 12:00

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Content Management Systems: Open Source Vs. Proprietary

An Introduction to Symfony

amccoy — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 15:42:21 +0000

An Introduction to Symfony

Introducing Symfony

Symfony is a modern, enterprise-level web application framework that utilizes the latest web technologies. Its highly-decoupled nature provides exceptional performance while allowing full customization of virtually every aspect of the system. Symfony sets itself apart with its strong architecture, large community, developer tools, and limitless extensibility.

Today, Symfony is used by some of the world’s largest organizations to power their custom applications. These include organizations like Fox, Condé Nast, National Geographic, Spotify, Trivago, BlaBlaCar, and the European Space Agency, to name just a few. With the advent of Symfony 4, we see capabilities that were not previously possible. Symfony consistently ranks within the top 10 web frameworks across all platforms and technologies and within the top 3 PHP-based frameworks. The framework and its components are downloaded over 108 million times every month.

A few capabilities that Symfony's provides are:

Extensible object-oriented architecture and helpful developer tools enable rapid application development
Easily customizable to work with any data structure, API, or technology
Build using the latest best-practices and community standards

Today, we will be introducing Symfony and its capabilities. For a better understanding of why Symfony is the platform of choice for advanced custom web applications around the world, we can break some core features down.

Limitless Extensibility

Unlike other frameworks, Symfony doesn’t have restrictions or assumptions about how your application should work. You can truly customize it to fit your exact needs.

A decoupled, object-oriented architecture means that any part of the framework can be extended, customized, replaced, or removed.
Symfony integrates with a wide variety of database types including SQL, NoSQL, key-value stores, graph databases, and other such technologies.
The advanced Security Component allows highly-custom, fine-grained control over authorization and permissions. Pluggable authentication allows login via LDAP, single sign-on, or any other identity provider.

Blazing Fast Performance

Symfony doesn’t impose unnecessary overhead on your application. Its small footprint means fast performance for your application and its end users.

Uses an advanced dependency injection container and proxy objects to achieve minimal overhead - data is only loaded and processed as needed
Leverages the HTTP Cache standard and supports ESI for advanced page caching
HTTP kernel architecture enables fast cache responses
The dependency injection container and frontend templates are precompiled for optimal performance in production
Easily handles millions of database records

Rapid Application Development

Symfony empowers developers to quickly build and scale their applications.

Pre-built components handle the mundane aspects of development like form validation and session management, allowing developers to focus on building the unique aspects of the application.
Automatically protects against common web vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and session hijacking.
An integrated console provides automatic code generation, allowing developers to quickly implement.
The Web Debug Toolbar provides immediate feedback on what’s happening behind-the-scenes, including detailed performance metrics for every page request.
Uses the Twig templating system to drastically reduce the time required to build the frontend interface.

Stability & Permanence

Since introducing Symfony in 2005, it has proven to be a reliable, rock-solid platform for building custom applications.

Major versions are fully supported for 3-4 years, including bug fixes and security patches.
A strong backward-compatibility promise ensures smooth upgrades to the latest versions of the framework.
Strict guidelines for responsible disclosure and rapid resolution of security issues ensures that the impact of potential threats is greatly minimized.
Development is sponsored by SensioLabs in partnership with over 2,000 open-source contributors.

Community Support

Organizations all over the world are taking advantage of Symfony’s large international community. Over 600,000 developers across the globe use Symfony to power their web applications and frequently contribute knowledge and code back to the community.

Over 10,000 enterprise-level bundles provide enhanced functionality at no cost
Can be integrated with over 200,000 additional libraries from the PHP community via Packagist
Exceptional documentation on how to utilize the framework and implement custom functionality

Conclusion

Symfony is an ideal choice to build your next web application. With introducing Symfony, we expect to see it continue to expand its adoption in the United States in 2019, as more organizations and institutions become aware of its versatility and capabilities. If you would like to learn more about how to leverage Symfony for your next initiative, contact us and our team would be happy to provide guidance.

amccoy Tue, 01/31/2017 - 10:42

Publication date

Tue, 01/31/2017 - 12:00

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An Introduction to Symfony

What Is GitHub & How Can It Benefit Your Development Team?

amccoy — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 18:25:14 +0000

What Is GitHub & How Can It Benefit Your Development Team?

GitHub and services like it, such as BitBucket, GitLab or Gitorious use git. Git is a distributed version control system written by the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, after he got frustrated with proprietary software. Git is similar to other version control systems such as subversion or CVS, but it's distributed. What this means is that if you clone a git project, you have the entire project history. You can commit, branch and tag all on you local machine without interacting with a server at all. If you were working with subversion or another centralized VCS all of your interactions occur with the server.

GitHub and similar services bring all of the benefits of a decentralized VCS to a centralized service. GitHub also stores a copy of your project's repository just like any other developer. Then, you basically designate that as the project's central repository and all the developers push and pull their changes to and from that repository. GitHub takes this a step further by encouraging developers to fork a project's repository and then use that as their own centralized repository. From there they can send "pull requests" to the main project with their changes and then the project maintainers can review them before deciding whether to include them in their project or not.

So what are the three best reasons to use GitHub?

1. It makes it easy to contribute to your favorite open source projects

Today, nearly every open-source project uses GitHub to manage their project. GitHub is free if your project is open source and includes a wiki and issue tracker that make it easy to include more in-depth documentation and get feedback about your project. Symfony, Ruby on Rails, and Django all use GitHub (symfony, rails, django) to develop their project and accept contributions from the community. Even the GitLab source is available at GitHub! If you want to contribute, you just fork their project, make your changes and then send them a pull request using the GitHub web interface.

Interestingly, Drupal doesn't utilize GitHub (they host their own central git repository). Their main repository is mirrored on GitHub, but their process for contributing is a little bit different, both for core and for modules which are also all git repositories. You can still use git, but you need to send patches directly to their issue tracker.

2. Markdown

Markdown is a way to write formatted documents using nothing more than a text editor. In fact, I wrote this post in markdown! And GitHub has turned everything into markdown: issue tracker, the wiki, comments, everything. Since we're already writing our READMEs and other documentation for the project in markdown so that it can be tracked easier using version control, it only makes it easier that we don't have to learn another system for formatting on other parts of the website.

GitHub uses what they call "GitHub flavored markdown", which makes a few changes to standard markdown which makes it more useful in a programming environment. Note that the other services also support markdown or have their own, similar flavored markdown.

3. Documentation

GitHub has excellent documentation. Their help section and guides have articles for nearly any topic related to git that you can think of. Need to know how to generate SSH keys? They have an article. Wondering about a good git workflow? They have a guide. If you're looking for a sample gitignore for your next project they have many samples for nearly anything you can think of. Are they missing one? You can fork their gitignore repository, add it and contribute it back!

Honorable Mention: Gists

GitHub introduced a feature some time ago, called gists, that allows you to turn one or more files into a git repository. Gists make it easy to share and track changes to configuration files or simple scripts. They aren't as feature-rich as a full-fledged GitHub repository; there isn't a wiki or issue tracker or many of the other features that make GitHub such a good tool. There are comments and you can make the gist private or public, even if you don't have a paid GitHub account.

Mention: GitHub pages

Using GitHub pages it's possible to create and host a static website for your project by simply commiting html pages to a separate repository like you would with any other git repository. Using pages, you can easily start blogging, write additional documentation for your project, or give it a web-presence it wouldn't otherwise have.

Does your team use GitHub? We here at Unleashed use GitLab because it allows us to use our own servers while still having a GitHub-like experience. What other collaboration tools do you use instead of or in addition?

amccoy Fri, 08/01/2014 - 14:25

Publication date

Fri, 08/01/2014 - 12:00

Topics

Featured Image

Default Image (DO NOT EDIT/REMOVE)

Symfony

2 Benefits of using Symfony for System Integrations

Streamlined and Customized Data Sharing Across Internal Platforms for Informed Decision-Making

Keeping Legacy Systems in Place Reduces Capital Expense

What This Means for You

2 Benefits of using Symfony for System Integrations

Unleashed Technologies Chosen as Silver Partner by SensioLabs

Unleashed Technologies Chosen as Silver Partner by SensioLabs

Tags

Symfony Development Services

Tags

Content Management Systems: Open Source Vs. Proprietary

Wappalyzer Data

Built With Data

What Does Gartner Say?

Final Thoughts

Content Management Systems: Open Source Vs. Proprietary

An Introduction to Symfony

An Introduction to Symfony

Introducing Symfony

Limitless Extensibility

Blazing Fast Performance

Rapid Application Development

Stability & Permanence

Community Support

Conclusion

An Introduction to Symfony

What Is GitHub & How Can It Benefit Your Development Team?

What Is GitHub & How Can It Benefit Your Development Team?

1. It makes it easy to contribute to your favorite open source projects

2. Markdown

3. Documentation

Honorable Mention: Gists

Mention: GitHub pages

What Is GitHub & How Can It Benefit Your Development Team?