TYPO3 Flow is a web application platform enabling developers creating
excellent web solutions and bring back the joy of coding. It
gives you fast results. It is a reliable foundation for complex
applications. And it is backed by one of the biggest PHP communities. At
the international TYPO3 Conference 2012 (T3CON12) TYPO3 was announced
as a family brand.
TYPO3 Flow provides the base of TYPO3 Neos, but can also be used independently, i.e. establishing own applications such as a blogsystem. In the context of Flow’s documentation a blogsystem is used to visualize the various paradigms of Flow like MVC (Model-View-Controller), AOP (Aspect-Oriented-Programming) or DDD (Domain-Driven-Design). The system uses namespaces and therefore runs only in PHP 5.3+. It uses Doctrine 2 as a database abstraction layer, and can interface with e.g. MySQL and PostgreSQL. More information: Official website Documentation
Business cases when to use TYPO3 Flow
- Social Media platforms where TYPO3 Flow provides framework features for user management, roles, REST APIs and integration with social media APIs as well as healthy package management.
- Business portals which need incremental development over years.
- Web products which need platform which can support Agile Development method and focuses on core product features in "Domain Driven Design" way.
- Content management systems in combination with TYPO3 Neos where custom plugins and packages are created using TYPO3 Flow. Compared to TYPO3 CMS v4 and v6 TYPO3 Neos is much more flexible and easy to extend.
- Mobile Apps need strong backend platform which can serve and manage data over REST APIs. TYPO3 Flow provides very easy way or writing Controllers which can render HTML as well as REST/JSON with minimal configuration and programming efforts.
- Large Database applications where huge amount of data is to be
processed and served. TYPO3 Flow allows you to focus on business logic
and its DBA layer with Doctrine makes the job easier. It also supports
using NoSQL databases like CouchDB
Benefits of using TYPO3 Flow
Biggest benefit of TYPO3 Flow is it allows you to write your business
logic easily with Domain Driven Concept and it does the rest. Thus is
allows to build complex and ever-growing applications quite easily and
without making them too complex and bulky over the period of
development. TYPO3 Flow perfectly suits Agile Development Methodology.
Below are few concepts which make TYPO3 Flow most advanced framework in
PHP world. Complete feature list is available here.
- Almost 40% code is generated with kickstarter once planned properly
- More focus on business logic programming
- Integration of rock solid Doctrine2 ORM
- Clean coding approach
- Structured source code with packages
- Easy integration of third party libraries using Composer
- Real object oriented programming experience
- Domain Driven Design approach
- Best suitable for large team size
- Full support of Test Driven Development
- Best suits with continuous integration systems
- Hassle-free experience using favorite IDE like Netbeans or PhpStorm
- Highly configurable
- Implementation of advanced concepts (e.g. Safe requests RFC 2616 - http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec9.html)
- Highly extensible
- Strong caching framework with support of various backends like APC, Redis
- Out of the box CLI programming
- Useful developer tools available for debugging and profiling
TYPO3 Flow Consulting
CTO and Executive Director of Lelesys Mr. Pankaj Lele provides
consulting for enterprise projects in Europe. He has been working in
TYPO3 Flow since mid 2011 when it was still in Alpha. He has worked on a
large TYPO3 Flow project in Germany as Architect and consultant for 2
years. He has been actively involved in TYPO3 Community as conference speaker and now also poised to start working as core team member of TYPO3 Neos. More information here.
Below are presentation videos of talks delivered by Pankaj Lele in TYPO3 conferences