Let's say I want to create a Blog in Symfony which lives in BlogBundle. But this BlogBundle has dependencies on other bundles like FOSUserBundle, KnpPaginator bundle, FMBbCodeBundle or whatever I end up using. Does this mean I can't really reuse the BlogBundle in another project. The Best Practices for Reusable Bundles chapter of the symfony cookbook says
A bundle must not embed third-party PHP libraries. It should rely on the standard Symfony autoloading instead.
But what does that mean exactly? Can't I use anything that isn't programmed by me?
If that is the case, I'd have to reinvent the wheel for the most basic problems I encounter in developing my bundle. For example I would have to come up with my own paginator to paginate content, create my own user manager and so on..
I don't see a point in that as I would waste my time fixing problems that have already been done much better than I could do.
Or does the cookbook mean I can't use anything that doesn't live inside a bundle. This would make much more sense to me.
It really irritates me that nobody really has done a blogbundle or something similar that gets good feedback and is mentioned anywhere in the top lists. I know, Symfony isn't meant to have a solution that just works out of the box and some coding is necessary, but still. All the bundles I can find that seem to be very popular are the ones that do something like parse BB Code, take care of User Management and other things that are hard and tedious to do, but never something bigger than doing only one task.
I hope you understand what I mean and can help me with my problem. Thanks in advance!
A bundle must not embed third-party PHP libraries. It should rely on
the standard Symfony autoloading instead.
This means that you shouldn't copy code of other libraries to your Bundle (directory). Instead that you should add them as a dependencies to your composer.json.
Related
I've recently started work at a new company, and was initially assigned to help the web development team.
To my horror, their template application they use to set up every single one of the projects they do, is completely procedural.
I am very eager to swap it over to OOP, but before I do that I need to actually understand how to create a project.
The initial work is there - there's an index.php that swallows all calls made to the site/web application.
What I need is a tutorial on how to set up proper routing so that I can look at a URL and go "call this function in this controller" instead of including a bunch of PHP files to get the job done.
Could someone please point me in the right direction?
I was in the same situation and this course helps me a lot to learn more about MVC and Routing in PHP. As #Armin said you can use Slim Framework or phroute .In the other hand, you can use Laravel framework to take care not only routing but also all the other challenges as a PHP developer you might have in the future
It sounds like they don't use any well known framework. They probably also don't want to use one. I think the best solution in this case would be some routing library. You could use the Slim Framework. You will understand everything you need to understand in about 30 minutes. It's very easy to setup and easy to extend.
You should not try to write your own routing library, it'll become quickly a quite complex thing. You will just reinvent the wheel and loose time.
I also would recommend the Slim Framework. I've spent way too much time trying to roll my own framework with routing but the maintenance and updating on my own framework got it the way of actual projects.
Slim is extremely easy to understand and offers a lot of flexibility to mold your own type of application. Between the routing, middleware, containers, and using the Eloquent DB ORM it has plenty to offer.
As others mentioned before, don't reinvent the wheel. There are plenty of tools out there you can lean on that allows you to focus on the actual project.
I think that Create your own PHP Framework from Symfony documentation is the thing you are looking for. You shouldn't be worried about the title, it's not only about creating frameworks. It shows you how to start using Symfony components in plain PHP application and eventually create your own framework.
But creating framework part is not the most important one. Understanding how to use object-oriented components in your code is the key part.
Of course, one of the components is routing. It's use is described in first chapters: Introduction, The HttpFoundation Component, The Front Controller, The Routing Component, Templating (don't skip this one!). But I recommend continuing to the end, it's easy to read and very interesting article. Even if you don't want to use Symfony (or it's components) this article will help you understand how to use any modern PHP components.
I've got a huge site that has been written (in a very bad way) in symfony 1.4
now, I've been asked to make some substantial changes to the navigation flow, add some features and so on..
considering the effort, I was wondering if it would be better to take the radical decision to port the entire website to symfony 2.0, but I'm not sure how hard that it could be.
Has anybody ever done this before?
Do you have any suggestion to make for patterns to follow, or tutorials or doc or whatever?
You may wrap your legacy project in a brand new sf2 project, by using this bundle. This way, you'll be able to migrate your project one piece at a time, and new functionalities may be developed with sf2 as soon as you get the wrapper to work.
You may be interested by this post about migrating
Here's how I would go about it:
You need to learn and study some things first:
HTTP fundamentals
PHP namespaces, which are heavily used
Symfony2 documentation
Symfony2 documentation
Symfony2 documentation
PHPUnit documentation
Then when you get the hang of Symfony2, you need to find out what to reuse from your old project:
Models, business logic?
Did you use Doctrine in symfony? If yes, look at how to port your entities to Doctrine2, and learn about the differences. If you used Propel, I would look at switching to Doctrine2 and not use the PropelBundle, atleast until you get used to Symfony2. You can find better documentation and sample code out there for Doctrine2.
You also need to convert your old helpers classes to Symfony2 services.
Views?
Symfony2 uses Twig as templating engine, but you could go with pure PHP.
Controllers?
This should feel somewhat similar to symfony. The flow of Symfony2 matches the HTTP flow, meaning you get a Request object and must reurn a Response object.
It really depends on how well structured our old project is. Symfony2 is an entirely different beast than 1.0-1.4. I would probably not call it a port, but a rewrite - however, if your old project is well structured you could probably reuse quite a bit.
Without actually seeing your code, it's impossible to give a good answer on how hard it would be. It's very much doable, but there is no easy route. Symfony2 is, IMHO, the way of the future for PHP projects and in the end you will get a project that is much easier to maintain and support.
I've got a huge site that has been written (in a very bad way) in symfony 1.4
now, I've been asked to make some substantial changes to the navigation flow, add some features and so on..
considering the effort, I was wondering if it would be better to take the radical decision to port the entire website to symfony 2.0, but I'm not sure how hard that it could be.
Has anybody ever done this before?
Do you have any suggestion to make for patterns to follow, or tutorials or doc or whatever?
You may wrap your legacy project in a brand new sf2 project, by using this bundle. This way, you'll be able to migrate your project one piece at a time, and new functionalities may be developed with sf2 as soon as you get the wrapper to work.
You may be interested by this post about migrating
Here's how I would go about it:
You need to learn and study some things first:
HTTP fundamentals
PHP namespaces, which are heavily used
Symfony2 documentation
Symfony2 documentation
Symfony2 documentation
PHPUnit documentation
Then when you get the hang of Symfony2, you need to find out what to reuse from your old project:
Models, business logic?
Did you use Doctrine in symfony? If yes, look at how to port your entities to Doctrine2, and learn about the differences. If you used Propel, I would look at switching to Doctrine2 and not use the PropelBundle, atleast until you get used to Symfony2. You can find better documentation and sample code out there for Doctrine2.
You also need to convert your old helpers classes to Symfony2 services.
Views?
Symfony2 uses Twig as templating engine, but you could go with pure PHP.
Controllers?
This should feel somewhat similar to symfony. The flow of Symfony2 matches the HTTP flow, meaning you get a Request object and must reurn a Response object.
It really depends on how well structured our old project is. Symfony2 is an entirely different beast than 1.0-1.4. I would probably not call it a port, but a rewrite - however, if your old project is well structured you could probably reuse quite a bit.
Without actually seeing your code, it's impossible to give a good answer on how hard it would be. It's very much doable, but there is no easy route. Symfony2 is, IMHO, the way of the future for PHP projects and in the end you will get a project that is much easier to maintain and support.
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First, let me apologize for Yet Another Framework Question. But I think this is different enough from the usual "What framework should I choose?" to warrant it.
Here's my situation: For the past year I've been using a custom framework. It's been used on everything from small CMS's to larger sites and even a mid sized social network. It's worked great but I now see its limitations. So, I've decided to switch to a 3rd party framework. The simpler frameworks (CI, Kohana, Cake) seem too inflexible from what I've heard - so this led me towards ZF. But, I've also heard that ZF may be too flexible and thus hard to work with. What further complicates this is that I'm looking for a one-size-fits-all solution; I need a setup that works on small projects to very large projects. I am the main developer, but I need my partner to eventually be able to learn the system and help with the less complicated programming tasks.
I've researched Doctrine and I love it. So I'm leaning towards Symfony (with Doctrine) as the main framework with ZF to fill in the gaps. Plus, I need the ability to add my own pieces to this platform parallel to any 3rd party libraries. I hope this will provide me with a solid, extensible platform, as we really can't afford to be switching out frameworks every few projects.
I'm looking for advice from others who have been in the same situation as I am in now. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Edit: I've posted my solution below in hopes of helping other people in the same situation
After some research I've decided to go with Symfony. Here are my reasons:
Less verbose than ZF
Seems very customizable due to usage of YAML files (yet I never feel overwhelmed by them)
Autoloading of custom classes doesn't require any extra work like in ZF (albeit it's not hard to set up in ZF)
The developer toolbar is great, and they're adding some nice features to it in ver 1.3
The ability to use pieces from other frameworks (ZF, eZComponents) makes me feel confident that I won't have trouble finding what I need
Comes bundled with Doctrine and is very easy to set up (in fact Doctrine will become the default ORM in ver 1.3)
It seems like there's a much larger community for Symfony. Google "symfony tutorials" versus "zend framework tutorials" and you'll see a massive difference in the number of results
Plenty of documentation: tutorials (the Jobeet tutorial so far is very good), API references, and a more human readable description of the framework and its underlying principles
Yahoo! has used it for a few of their own projects - it's nice to see a Big Name back a framework IMHO
Edit: For the sake of hopefully helping others in the same situation, here are some things I don't like about Symfony:
Does not follow the PEAR naming scheme (ZF does)
Internal classes begin with "sf". This is contrary to the practice of capitalizing the first letter of the class name
Variables and functions are written_like_this, yet class methods are camelCased - this seems sloppy to me
These are all cosmetic issues though; things that bother me because I like to do things my way. I realize that whenever you use third party software you must be willing to make some sacrifices.
ZF is certainly a nice framework, but I feel using Symfony as the primary framework and extending it with pieces of ZF is the best choice for me and my team.
Edit
It's been 2 years since originally posting this, and since it's still getting hits I thought I'd give a quick update. I probably built about 25 - 30 projects using symfony 1.x in the last 2 years, and I'm very happy with how it performed. As a full stack MVC framework, partnered with Doctrine, it handled almost everything I threw at it. And whatever it couldn't handle, it was easy to add my own custom code. In fact, that's what I love most about symfony - how easy it is to extend. I ended up building a bunch of plugins and Doctrine behaviors that greatly reduced development time. And the admin generator tools have been a god-send. I'm still using symfony 1.4 for a few projects here and there, but have decided to mainly focus now on using Symfony2. It's a completely different beast than symfony 1, but I really appreciate its architecture. More importantly, it seems even easier to extend than symfony 1.x. I do miss some of 1.x's features, but that's the sacrafice you have to make when switching frameworks.
I like using ZF because of strong conventions. You can be sure, that everything will be as you expect it. Class names, function names, variable names, directory structure, ... all of it. It really speeds up the development if you stick to it. If you adapt it it's more like looking into your own code, when checking the ZF internals ;)
Let's be honest. ZF is not fast. Not as fast as Nette, CodeIgniter, etc. But the difference is that there is a class for everything. And if there is not, there is a class you can extend or interface you can implement.
All the other frameworks try to gain on the "wow" effect (blog in 30secs, twitter in 2 hours, etc). But when develioping a real life application, you realize, that it's the use at will, flexible and extensive architecture, that you need.
Zend Framework: Huge, Flexible, Modular.
I'd use only if am building a enterprise big ultra system.
But, I'm using Yii Framework and I like it.
Because: Very Fast, Simple, Widgets (easy to reuse component, this is very nice).
Yii it's easer to use, because is not a enterprise framework, and have all Basic features you really need in most cases.
*
EDIT: Now that I nearly understand HOW
to improve the ZendFramework using
your own code (as asked here Adding
3rd Party lib to Zend and here
Using 3rd Party lib within Zend),
I switched back to ZendFramework. I
currently design my application and
each day which I work and test
anything with ZendFramework it gets
more and more familiar and it easily
quickens my developement. My advise:
Use ZendFramework.
*
I have currently the same problem:
My story:
I was using CakePHP until I wanted to expand my project's size.
CakePHP was not as flexible as I wanted it to be.
So i tried to use ZendFramework.
The very first time I read the 'QuickStart' guide, i was a little bit afraid of having that much files for a simple guestbook application.
After a time of 'playing' with the ZendFramework I decided to use ZF as a 3rd party lib in my own custom framework.
The problem is, IF you use Zend's MVC components you might be forced to use 30% of the whole framework, because the MVC components are one of the biggest part of the ZF.
I mean if I use that much of a framework WHY shouldn't you use the rest, too?
After that, I decided to write my COMPLETE custom framework without using ZendFramework as 3rd party lib.
Now I am sitting in front of mountains of papers, full of sketches about code design.
I will keep you up to date about my further decisions.
I honestly think it really depends on your style. There's no end all be all answer to this question.
ZF relies heavily on classic and proven design principles. It's also very extensible, but requires more "configuration" than "convention". I personally do not trust 3rd party code by nature, so I'm a fan of more verbosity, for the sake of being more familiar with the technology I'm working with. But that's just me.
I've also used CakePHP successfully and two other frameworks proprietary to a company I worked for with great success. They're all trying to do similar things, just pick what feels best for you.
I've personally used CakePHP successfully for both large and small projects, however it is often difficult to make it budge the way you want. My reasons for using Cake continue to reside in the fact that the community support is top notch, the security updates are often, and they do not force meta-packages (such as unit testing) upon you (although this is bundled, you can just bin it if you're not interested in using the built in package).
Altogether, it's made a nice system for me over the past few months, however I have heard time and time again that Symphony is fantastic, so you may perhaps be on the money with your first thoughts. With NetBeans support for Symphony in the pipeline, I may too find the need to switch before long.
I've been looking for a good PHP ORM tool to use, and I recently found a good ORM class in Kohana. It has a fairly good and simple ORM implementation. The problem is, the code is unreusable outside of the Kohana framework without a rewrite/refactor. It relies on the Kohana class loader and various framework loading strategies to even work in the first place. Further, the required classes aren't packaged into a single dependency directory, or even multiple directories.
When I do this rewrite, I intend to republish the code via sourceforge or something, and those guys can of course reuse it if they want. So, should I just package the fileset needed into one directory, and make the appropriate classes do a require_once on any dependant classes, and 2 should I stick with the original class names that are project dependent (like Kohana_exception) even though it is pretty much unrelated to the Kohana project as a whole?
A second option would be to write another classloader that is a simplified version of the Kohana Framework classloader, and only cares about the ORM related stuff...
If you think what you are doing will be a marked improvement to the Kohana project you should make your changes and submit a patch to be considered by the project's maintainers. You probably aren't the first person to appreciate a part of their framework and component-izing their framework into smaller bits may be something you could help encourage by submitting a patch (though that will require much more time on your part to engineer).
It sounds like you are extracting a piece of their framework for independent use so it doesn't sound like you're forking at all, though I can imagine removing all of those dependencies may sure seem like a fork.