The Symfony Live events of this Fall (London, Berlin, NYC, Madrid) are around the corner, and for the first year, Commerce Guys is going to attend these events as a sponsor. Some people are wondering why, and I’d like to explain why Commerce Guys is very excited to engage with the Symfony community and its open source software vendor, SensioLabs.
In fact, there are 3 main reasons for Commerce Guys’ interest in Symfony and working tightly with SensioLabs:

Drupal 8 and Drupal Commerce 2.0

It’s no secret that Drupal8 will rely on Symfony components. This architecture decision is good, and paved the way for similar thoughts on Drupal Commerce 2.0. It also ties the destinies of both open source communities, we think for the better. The work on Drupal Commerce for Drupal 8, known as Drupal Commerce 2.x, started in June 2014. During a community sprint that included members of SensioLabs and other partners like Smile, Publicis Modem, Osinet, i-KOS, Adyax, and Ekino, we validated the idea that some of the core eCommerce components of Drupal Commerce 2.x should rely on Symfony and other general PHP libraries directly. The goal is to offer an even more generic and flexible solution that spreads the impact of our code beyond the walls of the Drupal community.
This effort is well in progress already. Bojan Zivanovic, Drupal Commerce 2.x co-maintainer, provides a great example of this in a recent blog post about our new Internationalization library. He explains how much improvement this component will bring to the software for managing and formatting currencies internationally via a generic PHP library called commerceguys/intl. Expanding the reach of our work to the broader PHP community will help us get more feedback, more users, and more open source contributors, ultimately leading to better software. Ryan Szrama, Commerce Guys co-founder and Drupal Commerce CTO, will be presenting this approach at Symfony Live in New York City in October. We strongly believe this vision will bring us closer to our goal of building the most popular open source eCommerce software.

Platform.sh now refined for Symfony projects

In a context where Symfony will be central to mastering Drupal 8 projects, we’ve pursued the goal to enable our development & production Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Symfony projects in general. We’re convinced that this will provide Platform.sh an edge, and wanted to be a driving force in providing tools that will fit both open source communities.
Since Spring 2014, Commerce Guys engineers have been collaborating with SensioLabs engineers to understand Symfony better. Few companies in the world have the expertise in enterprise PHP that SensioLabs has, and the Platform.sh Symfony experience is the outcome of lots of intense discussions with the SensioLabs’ team.
Our objective was to enable teams to develop and deploy Symfony projects faster and more productively on Platform.sh. That work is now done and we’re very happy to announce today that, with just a few clicks, Symfony developers can create a full Symfony development environment (starting from an existing Symfony distribution), in order to build and deploy highly scalable websites and custom applications. This will lead to a much improved development process, lots of time saved for developers and a reduced time to market from development to production. Sponsoring Symfony live is a way for Commerce Guys to share the hard work we’ve done to build a unique, cloud-based development experience for Symfony developers. We’re excited to share our work and get feedback from the Symfony community about this product.

A shared focus on the developers

The time we’ve spent with SensioLabs’ management team highlighted our common passion and interest: help developers be more efficient and successful and, as much as it depends on us, to enjoy their jobs even more. SensioLabs and Commerce Guys were both founded to design and develop open source frameworks, gather large and global developer communities, and enable developers to create great web experiences. Both companies aim at making developers happier and more successful by providing them the right tools. It’s on these values and fundamental principles that this partnership was built. It’s all very solid and here to stay!

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