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Oro Platform

This item was not updated in last three versions of the Radar. Should it have appeared in one of the more recent editions, there is a good chance it remains pertinent. However, if the item dates back further, its relevance may have diminished and our current evaluation could vary. Regrettably, our capacity to consistently revisit items from past Radar editions is limited.
Assess

OroPlatform is a framework built on Symfony 2 with the purpose of providing the features you need in every business application that is not your core business logic. Hence, it serves you with a basic application, providing login and complex security, menus and menu management, history, audit trails, settings management, etc. It comes complete with a design and many widgets to be utilized in own entities. Other Features of OroPlatform are, for example, a WebSocket server-driven user interface, queue-based task runners, REST Interface, as well as messaging- and workflow systems.

One of the central features is that entities, which are to be managed within the system, can be set up completely by configuring them using the UI. This in itself implies that it puts another abstraction layer upon doctrine and symfony defaults.

As with every framework or application, the general-purpose goals and abstraction comes with drawbacks: In fact, OroPlatform modifies and extends the common way of doing things in Symfony in several places, which makes the developer's life hard at times. Also, the UI and package managing are set in such a way that they are hard to extend or replace. The many additional abstraction layers can result in decreased performance.

On the other hand, OroPlatform gives you a good head start for prototyping and frees you from rebuilding common requirements - which makes it a relevant choice for business applications with the need to manage several entities in a backend. Also, projects such Akeneo or OroCRM use OroPlatform with success.

Since the project is still young, the future development and improvements need to be watched. We classified the Framework as Assess.