Innomatic is an open source, mature and easy to use distributed PHP 5 Web applications container developed by Innoteam, particularly oriented towards business and administrative applications such as CRM, CMS, Web based frontends for legacy applications (eg. AS/400 ones) and so on.

Today we announce the general availability of Innomatic 5.0, ready to be downloaded and deployed. Innomatic is distributed with the new BSD license, making it a perfect base for developing and, if you are a Software House, distributing and selling your Web based applications, also thanks to the AppCentral feature and marketplace.

You can find more information about Innomatic at the Innomatic about page and at the public wiki. You can also try the Innomatic Desktop accessing the Innomatic demo.

Example of Innomatic Domain Desktop with some custom applications enabled

Main high-level features and benefits

• Container of multiple applications and customers/sites: a single installation of Innomatic is able to contain and manage multiple shared PHP applications and separately enable them to multiple customers/sites.
• Specialized for administrative applications: Innomatic provides a ready environment (both for users and developers) with a MVC based Web Desktop user interface, especially suitable for administrative Web applications such as CRM, CMS, Document Management, e-Business, custom and similar applications. Anyway, you can also build normal Web applications with the frameworks provided by Innomatic (or by Innomatic based applications) for this purpose.
• Introduces a new way to distribute and manage Web applications: applications can be fetched and bought manually or from AppCentral, a central repository of Innomatic based applications. Thanks to the strong modular architecture of Innomatic, applications can be installed and upgraded with no effort, allowing very fast deployment and management of Web based solutions. Developers and software houses can sell their Innomatic applications through AppCentral.

Read more about the Innomatic features.

Main differences with other PHP frameworks

Premising that Innomatic is not (only) a PHP framework, one of the main differences between Innomatic and the other PHP platforms is that Innomatic is a container for multiple applications and domains/sites, while the majority of other frameworks serves as a skeleton for a single Web application/site. In fact, already existing (and multiple) frameworks can be ported and used as webapp handlers for domain webapps.

Also, Innomatic is not a CMS: external Innomatic based applications can provide CMS features instead.

Read more about the differences from other PHP frameworks.

So you can’t directly compare Innomatic with frameworks such as Symfony, CakePHP, Zend Framework and so on, which are very good, first class PHP frameworks; nor Innomatic wants to compete with them. Instead, you can use and integrate your favourite framework with Innomatic, if the ones provided by Innomatic are not a good fit for your requirements.

A common PHP framework generally serves the purpose of speeding up a single Web site/application development, providing a structured files skeleton, standardized APIs, already available implementation of design patterns such as MVC, coding standards and so on.

This is true for a certain part of Innomatic too, but the latter is a new system of its own. You can think of Innomatic as a container of multiple, shared Web based applications made accessible to separated customer’s/organization’s profiles (called “Domains”) within the same Innomatic installation, in particular administrative-type applications such as a CRM, Intranet, CMS, e-Commerce and so on, with a modular approach, e.g. you can enable certain applications to some Domains only.

Relations between Innomatic applications, Domains and Web Apps

For this purpose, Innomatic provides an applications desktop, authentication, localization, Web services interface, a security layer, a maintenance system, applications dependencies, applications upgrading and many more user ready features, greatly reducing the development overhead. This is like developing standard client applications using widgets (e.g. QT/GTK in Linux, Cocoa in Mac OS X, etc.), but in a Web environment (as you can see yourself in the Innomatic Demo).

Example of Innomatic Domain Desktop with some applications enabled

However, just like a common framework, with Innomatic you are also able to develop a frontend for a public Web site, or other administrative-type applications with a system different from the standard Innomatic desktop. For each domain an optional so called “Web App” is created, handled by one or more Web App Handlers following a set of URL based mappings: a Innomatic Web App Handler is the feature most similar to a common Web sites PHP framework. In the MVC paradigm, the Web App Handler is the Front Controller, along with the Innomatic Web App Processor.

General flows of a Web App in Innomatic

Innomatic natively provides some Web App Handlers (a static HTML server, a PHP based handler, a Xajax interface), that can be mixed in the same Web App, while other new ones are being made available as Innomatic based applications. You can also use an external PHP framework as a Web App Handler, and it is already planned to port some frameworks as native Innomatic Web App Handlers. The Innomatic desktop is a particular case of Web App Handler itself.

What is the ideal link between a Innomatic Domain and its own Web App? The Domain Desktop would be the backend (for example the CMS or e-Commerce application) of a Innomatic Web based solution, while the Web App would be the frontend part, with a new Web App Handler provided by the CMS.

What do you think about this new way of developing and consuming Web based PHP solutions? Was this post clear enough about explaining why Innomatic is a different sort of platform?

Please let we know in the Innomatic forum or in this post comments.

• innomatic-5.0-RC1.tgz

Please provide feedback.

I know the strings are Italian – rest assured that the platform is completely localized and the (already available) English language is the default one. I just wanted to still remain a bit criptic but you can find some more information about the Innomatic architecture and general features in the Innomatic wiki.

Alex