How evolver group is using PhpStorm to innovate in the media industry
Today we are excited to share an interview with Daniel Schröder, development lead at evolver group. Read on for his insight into how his development team is using PhpStorm to keep innovating in software products and IT solutions for the media industry.
About evolver group
evolver group is known as one of today’s most innovative software companies in the media industry. With major products like evolverOAS (Online Ads System), evolverCMS (Content Management System), evolverSSO (Single Sign-On + Paywall + Payment) and their evolver rental software (portal solutions for employment, real estate, automotive and obituary markets), evolver group provides the complete range of software products and IT solutions for media companies.
With a staff of more than 50, evolver media GmbH & Co. KG and evolver services GmbH take care of evolver group services to ensure their media industry customers’ success on the Internet.
evolver media, the core of the group, was founded by the managing partners Torsten Gramann and Mathias Moeckel in 1999 and has since significantly expanded its activities in the media industry.
evolver group works for clients such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Rheinische Post, FUNKE Media Group, and Axel Springer AG.
We’ve talked with Daniel Schröder, development lead at evolver group, and got insight about their experience with PhpStorm.
What technologies and development practices do you use in evolver group?
Daniel Schröder, development lead at evolver group
We mostly rely on these noteworthy technologies:
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PHP for most of the backend, including advanced use of Zend Framework 2, Symfony 2 components, Doctrine 2, Composer for package management, Phing as a build tool, PHPUnit for unit testing, Behat for BDD, Xdebug as debugging engine, and XHProf as profiler
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JavaScript & NodeJS, including NPM, Bower, AngularJS, Grunt, Karma, etc.
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Git and Subversion (in release) as VCS
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REST + HAL (Hypertext Application Language) and BaaS (backend as a service)
From the project management side, we are incorporating Scrum framework approach. Our sprint teams are about five people, and sprint length is between two and three weeks.
We also take advantage of Gitflow workflow using Atlassian products (Jira, Bamboo, Stash) with pull requests and reviews.
How long have you been using PhpStorm? What made you choose it?
We started using PhpStorm in late 2013. Before that we’d tried Zend Studio, and sometimes NetBeans and UltraEdit Studio.
In the end, we chose PhpStorm over all the other IDEs we tested, because it provides much better integration of our preferred technologies and tools, and for sure has better performance. Our entire team was happy to switch to PhpStorm.
How does PhpStorm help your team?
PhpStorm is used for development of all of our PHP backend, as well as JavaScript frontend. We are taking advantage of many IDE features, such as syntax highlighting, code completion, debugger, code analysis (PHP & JS linting, PHP Mess Detector, PHP Code Sniffer, JS hint), various plugins for technologies and tools mentioned earlier, databases & SQL integration, (SSH) terminal, and remote interpreters.
We also use some of PhpStorm’s tools for working with VCS (mostly adding and removing files), and for the rest we use Git/SVN GUI and CLI.
Many essential features are available in PhpStorm out of the box (or with free plugins), so there is no need to use 3rd-party tools. Soon after we switched to PhpStorm, we were able to access all the features we needed for software development in evolver group, and we found them simple to use and powerful.
Do you feel the team is more productive with PhpStorm?
Yes, for sure! evolver group development team has significantly improved its productivity using PhpStorm IDE, thanks to better performance compared to all the other IDEs we’ve tried. We’ve also reduced the risk of errors and bugs by relying on PhpStorm’s integrated deep code analysis.
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Сase studies with evolver group are available in PDF format. We would like to thank evolver group and especially Daniel Schröder for this interview and sharing his insights.
We welcome your feedback in blog post comments below. If you, too, would like to share your experience with PhpStorm, please contact Mikhail Vink, Product Marketing Manager for PhpStorm (Mikhail.Vink [at] jetbrains.com).
Develop with pleasure!
-JetBrains PhpStorm Team
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