HCL Digital Experience vs. Laravel PHP Framework

HCL DX does really well at managing and maintaining the site. It allows the business to basically maintain the site while IT spent time developing new and enhanced functions. The main issue I currently have with HCL DX is not directly with the product but it does play a role. It is difficult finding skilled resources to support HCL DX in my experience.

Incentivized

I would say that Laravel is not a suitable framework for high-frequency, high-volume, real-time interaction or processing millions of records in batch operations. It shines for standard database web applications (CRUD, Admin Panels, etc.) and is a fantastic multi-developer framework.

Incentivized

• With Version 8.5, IBM Web Content Manager introduced in place editing capabilities which allow authors to make content edits on sections of the page instead of going to the content itself. This feature allows authors to make changes in context of the page and preview changes within the actual look and feel of a live page.
• Projects provide a collaborative atmosphere for the author community so that authors can interact and work as a team to manage inter-dependent content changes under one project and publish all changes at once, instead of working separately on individual content changes. This brings awareness across authors in an organization and easy knowledge share.
• IBM Digital Data Connector is a cool feature that allows [users] to integrate external content sources onto the portal using IBM Web Content Manager presentation components. This allows UI/UX designers to present integrated external data in any manner they want, manage UI changes with an underlying approval process and leverage syndication to push changes live immediately.
• IBM Web Content Manager offers a targeted content feature that allows business users to deliver personalized content to customers based on customer demographic information, browsing history and other transaction related information. Any rules created follow the publishing process thereby making it just a configurable item resulting in less turn around to turn on the feature on a website.
• IBM Web Content Manager offers 'multi lingual solution' out of the box which allows content creation for almost all popular languages.
• Syndication feature has improved a lot and it now provides a detailed views comprising of 'failed items', 'items that have syndicated successfully, 'items in queue'. Failed items view provides detailed and clear cut information of what resulted in failure helping IT to troubleshoot problems easily.

Incentivized

• Laravel utilizes the best possible PHP standards and coding practices.
• Laravel uses many widely-accepted community libraries and builds upon them, rather than re-inventing everything.
• Laravel has many components available from the community and is extremely easy to build custom components for, either with custom code or by integrating existing third-party PHP libraries.
• Laravel is flexible enough to power pretty much any kind of application I can imagine.

Incentivized

• IBM Web Content Manager should provide some easily usable connectors through a GUI to connect to bring content from custom data sources including connecting to Salesforce and custom databases.
• Should further optimize and enhance creation of rich and responsive content driven UIs on various digital channels.
• Should further optimize and enhance content personalization features.

Incentivized

• Laravel is updated regularly, which is great. However, in order to get the latest features, use the newest 3rd party libraries, have the most current security updates, and ensure that the newest features of PHP are usable, you have to continuously upgrade your Laravel application. This costs time and money, obviously, and if you don't stay on top of the updates you will quickly fall behind. This is the case with any open source software, but it needs to be considered for any team considering using Laravel or any other software.
• Because of the size of the Laravel community, there are a LOT of 3rd party libraries. Some of these are great, some are less than great. Sometimes it's difficult to evaluate the quality of a library, making it difficult to trust many libraries. Developers need to be cautious and thoughtful when considering using new software.
• Because of the rapid development of the Laravel framework, the size of the community, and the simplicity of being able to publish content online - it is very easy to find documentation, tutorials, or other "advice" that is not up to date, or that has outdated information.

Incentivized

IBM products always moves forward to adapt to new requirements and technologies. I have used versions 6, 6.1, 7 and 8 of IBM WCM, and I know IBM is ready to revamp the tool based on emerging needs, and still provide the capabilities to migrate your old system to the newer versions.

Laravel PHP Framework has continued to exceed my expectations. It supported me in the development of a high quality and stable web application that is mission critical for the organization. I cannot imagine wanting to use any other tool for web development. Documentation, unit tests, and numerous integration options make using Laravel PHP Framework a natural choice.

Incentivized

New versions has increased user experience facilitating usability.

As I mentioned earlier Laravel PHP Framework has lot of in built feature as well as there is vast set of packages available to add the features in your application. It has very large community who can help when you feel stuck somewhere. This is why this rating is justified.

Incentivized

We had some issues related with performing and the support was suitable and sucessful.

Implementation was successful due to Websphere application server used.

Magento and Prestashop are E-commerce CMS platforms. They are used in a different scale of application than WCM.

Concerning Joomla, it's a useful CMS forsmaller website. Once again this is an other scale of application than WCM Liveray can compete WCM 7 concerning the : ¤ specific development ¤ security ¤ responsive

Supporting unit testing is bigger plus point in Laravel than any other framework. Developing with Laravel is much easier. Other frameworks have value in market, but Laravel has taken the lead in popularity among PHP developers in recent years. The large community supports you if you have problems. Using Laravel, integration became easy with third-party libraries, but it was costly too.

Incentivized

• Negative: Very complex architecture for on-premise deployments (too many servers to installed)
• Positive: Easy customization
• Negative: Architecture limited to cloud solutions
• WCM is an old product and needs an update
• Blog, and community are not integrated in Digital Manager for discussion
• Templates are not available to integrate basic services (FileNet, more complex BPM , e-commerce)

Incentivized

• Positive: Our delivery time for PHP application is faster than usual.
• Positive: Developers are happy and they write better code with their usual development tools. No tool-upgrade necessary.
• Negative: Initial delivery took 6 months extra and had to rewrite project several times.

Incentivized