What we learned by merging two big Symfony based applications: eZ Publish / eZ Platform with Sylius eCommerce

1. What we learned by merging
two big Symfony based
applications
Ivo Lukač @ SymfonyCon 2017, Cluj

2. www.netgenlabs.com
• Ivo Lukač, co-founder of Netgen
Also: developer, site builder, architect, consultant, project manager,
evangelist, speaker, event organiser, business developer, …
• Netgen, web agency, Croatia, ~20 employees
• 15 years of experience building complex content-
centric web solutions, using eZ Publish since
2004, Symfony since 2013.
About me

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Web Summer Camp

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HOW THIS STORY
STARTED

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• Clients are demanding better mixing of content and
commerce features
• Our stack:
• Content managed with eZ Publish / eZ Platform
• eCommerce features implemented with Sylius
CMS + eCommerce

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• eZ Publish CMS open-sourced in 1999 by eZ Systems
from Norway
• Complete refactoring started in 2011
• eZ Platform, the new generation based on Symfony,
released in 2015
• Flexible and customisable content model still the key
feature

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• Sylius - modern eCommerce based on Symfony2,
founded in 2011 by Paweł Jędrzejewski
• Modern coding standards, SOA, independent
components as bundles, IoC, BDD
• Version 1.0 stable released in 2017

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INTEGRATION NEEDED!

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Loose integration
• A usual approach for integrating 2 or more systems
is by establishing remote connections via
standard protocols (e.g. http)
• Remote systems are treated as black boxes and
completely independent
• Lastest buzzwords: “microservices” and “serverless”

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Symfony - common denominator
• Both eZ and Sylius use Symfony full stack as their
baseline, they have the same:
database access, template engine, service container,
logging, events, caching, security, mailing, assets,
environment configuration, translation, …

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Tight integration
• If 2 systems are built on the same framework and
use a lot of the same components - there is a
possibility to tightly integrate them on the same
application instance
• Suggesting new buzzword: “coupling the decoupled”

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In 2015 we got a
suitable project.
Our partner Locastic
helped with Sylius
knowhow
First integration was
based on:
- eZ Publish 2014.11
- Sylius 0.14
- Symfony 2.5

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Repos
• github.com/netgen/ezpublish-community-sylius
Symfony application with merged Sylius and eZ
Publish
• github.com/netgen/NetgenEzSyliusBundle
provides features that glue eZ and Sylius together

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In the meanwhile
• eZ Platform v1 was released, Sylius v1 was released, so
we are at the moment working on the new integration:
• ezplatform-sylius - new app repo, WiP
• ezpublish-community-sylius - deprecated
• NetgenEzSyliusBundle - master branch to be tagged as
version 2

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NetgenEzSyliusBundle - the glue
• Field type for linking Sylius products inside eZ Platform
content objects (translatable, sortable, removable)
• Replacing Sylius product routes with related eZ
Platform content routes
• User provider(s)
• Authentication success handler

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Working as expected?
• Twig template extend feature makes it easy to
integrate front side templates
• Database configuration can use the same
parameters
• Dependency injection and service container make it
trivial to use “the other system’s” features

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LETS TALK ABOUT
CHALLENGES

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1. Composing
2. Routing
3. Authentication
4. Authorization
5. Admin interface
Main challenges

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1. Composing
• Even if both systems are full stack Symfony it is possible to
run into problems during composing the app. Remember
we are talking about merging 2 big apps with many
dependencies
• Some dependencies could conflict (e.g. Doctrine)
• Fix choices:
- wait for the next release (create PRs to speed this up)
- some composer magic could help

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1. Composing
• It could happen that both systems support different Symfony
versions (Sylius 1.0 beta dropped support for Symfony 2
while eZ was still not working with Symfony 3)
• Fix choices:
- basically nothing, just waiting
- Sylius created a temporary BC branch:
"sylius/sylius": "dev-revert-symfony3-updated as 1.0"

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2. Routing
• If any of the systems doesn’t use the system router,
they should support the Chain router well (we had a
related bug in Sylius needed to be solved)
• One side should be prefixed:
sylius:
resource: "sylius_routing.yml"
prefix: %ez_sylius.shop_path_prefix%

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3. Authentication
• Authenticating users separately should work
• Sylius 0.* used FOSUserBundle,
• Sylius 1.* uses custom user providers (plural !!!)
• eZ uses custom user provider

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3. SSO Authentication
• For SSO a security event listener is needed for
authenticating the user with both providers
• eZ Publish used the user class directly (not the
interface) so we couldn’t pass the Sylius user class:
we created a PR to be able to do this eventually

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4. Authorisation
• For authorisation to work a user object from one system
needs to be connected (treated as same) to the related
user object in another system
• If possible avoid the need for authorisation on both sides.
• For example, in our first project we need to connect the
admin users from both system but the site users didn’t
have to be authorised on eZ, only on Sylius

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4. Connecting related users
• To allow manual connecting of users we
implemented a script:
ezsylius:user:connect <sylius-user-type>
<sylius-user-email> <ez-user-login>
• Of course, a post update/create user event support
would be a nicer solution

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4. Trouble with Sylius 1.*
• For Sylius 1.* lot of refactoring was done with lot of
BC brakes. One of the things was the user
management part: admin users and normal users
got completely separated.
• Our authentication and authorisation needed to be
done from scratch - we implemented a composite
user provider to handle all providers

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5. User interface
• If authentication and admin users authorisation is
working there is a chance to even merge the admin
interface
• In most cases probably not a straight forward to do
due to different UI frontend architectures. We needed
to do a PR to Sylius and also use bundle inheritance

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Pros
• With both systems working on the same instance the
possibility to mesh up things are much bigger
• Provides a single admin interface
• Problems could be spotted earlier, while in
development

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Cons
• Complexity, good expertise on both systems needed
• Depending on 2 roadmaps instead of 1
• Might be performance issues, at least when doing
composer update, due to lot of dependencies

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What we learned?
• A lot about Symfony and Composer :)
• To appreciate good roadmaps, semantic
versioning, extensible code
• Symfony does a lot of lifting

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MAYBE ALL THIS WILL GET
DEPRECATED WITH FLEX :)

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If you need something similar
• Have expertise on Symfony and both systems you
want to merge
• Check if both roadmaps and release cycles are
aligned
• Check if PRs are merged in reasonable time
• Check what licensing you need to apply

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Conclusion
• Tightly integrating 2 systems is probably an overkill
in lot of situations
• Could be worth the effort if you need:
• access to all underlaying features
• a single UI
• SSO and complex authorisation

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DO YOU HAVE A
SIMILAR USE CASE?

40. Thank you!
ivo@netgen.hr
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