A little more than a month ago, on this blog, I talked about how Symphony’s powerful integration framework and certain integrations themselves were being developed in the open. These integrations and this framework serve to extend the Symphony platform, and enable our customers, partners and developer community to have the ability to engage with the Symphony platform directly by building an integration. If you are in NYC, don’t miss the Foundation’s talk on this exact topic!

As you might remember, on top of the framework, we contributed six integrations (GitHub, JIRA, Salesforce, Trello, Zapier and Universal WebHook) to demonstrate what can be built.

Since the last blog post, the platform team at Symphony is proud to say that you are now able to do the following:

• Build and run the integrations locally, pointing to a live Symphony instance, such as the Foundation's Open Developer Platform
• Build and deploy your custom integration, or modify an existing one on a Symphony pod, of which you have access
• Easily create the setup page for your app with templated configuration pages
• Submit your new integration to be considered for inclusion in the Symphony Market

Developing an integration

You can start developing integrations or modifying them either on a Symphony pod, of which you have appropriate access, or by engaging with the Symphony Software Foundation and its Open Developer Platform (ODP). You’ll be able to build a new integration, or modify an existing one in minutes, by leveraging the Foundation project infrastructure to deliver secure and high-quality code to the cloud using the CI/CD pipeline shown below:

If you want a jumpstart, together with the Foundation team, we recently built from scratch a Symphony HubSpot integration which you can use as a starting point for your developments. The code is currently being contributed to the Foundation.

The journey ahead

As we continue to improve the code base of the integrations, in the coming months, you can expect to be able to experience the following:

• Enhanced support for third-party renderers that have complete parity with what was originally possible with native Symphony code. As a side note, we are working in alignment with the Financial Objects Standardization Working Group to make it seamless for the community and developers to create rich objects, such as financial objects.
• Containerization of the integration bridge (iBridge) to make it incredibly easy to get the integrations up, deployed and running in a Symphony pod, of which you have the right level of access.

As always, I would like to thank the Foundation for their great support as we work together on this journey to an ever richer Symphony developer community. Look out for further updates here, and in the integration’s repositories as well. As you engage with the integrations and their framework, please do not hesitate to engage directly in the Foundation repository.

We'd love to get your feedback and contributions! If you'd like to contribute a new or existing integration, click here or reach out to us or to the community on the developer list.