Can you direct me to some tutorials or helpful information regarding Symfony2 and common components among similar projects? I have two projects that will use a tremendous amount of the same code (mostly backend logic/user handling/checkouts), but there will be quite a different in the frontend templates, display and functionality.
Currently I have three folders with symlinks (Project 1, Project 2, and Symfony Base). Is this the best setup? Recommendations for doing it better?
Symfony 2 Bundles are what you want here. Wrap up all the stuff you want to share between projects in a bundle installed in to both - then build the project specific UI on top of it.
Would recommend on the Symfony 2 docs: http://symfony.com/doc/2.0/cookbook/bundles/index.html
Related
Let's consider I have different projects for my company. What is the best practice concerning symfony 2 ?
1. Add new bundle for each project in the same symfony 2 skeleton (there could be several bundles for one project: even shared bundles between differents project)
2. Add a new Symfony 2 skeleton for one project (there could be several bundles for one project)
if way number 1 is acceptable, is there a maximum number of bundles for one symfony 2 skeleton ?
A Bundle is a logical component in your website like a backend or a menue. You should build your bundles global that you can use it in new projects.
I would prefer to make more instances and build bundles that were included in your projects (vendor folder). Then you have single components and can use it in new projects.
The advantage is that you can have different versions in different projects. Perhaps you need another version of a bundle in Project A and Project B. Thats its a bit complicated with one instance.
When need to scale your website its better to have more instances to put it on different servers. When you have only one instance with all projects then you need everytime the complete sources.
You can build your own composer packages to update and deploy over composer.
https://packagist.org/
I think there are some more package builder.
I have an application which is developed in Symfony2. Now the structure for it is as follows:
FrontBundle - includes everything related to the application's view and UI.
PersistanceBundle - includes everything related to the persistence layer of the application.
DomainBundle - includes everything related to the entities of the application and the services.
Is this structure ok? Or bundles are used like forum feature - ForumBundle - which includes every layer (controllers, services, domain logic and persistence) related to the forum.
There are no hard and fast rules on how to structure your app using bundles, but here's what I came to after developing on Symfony2 for close to a year.
Use one app specific bundle. At first, I started with multiple bundles like CommonBundle, UserBundle, MainBundle, BlogBundle, ContactBundle, etc. That proved to be not so convenient in the end, so I switched to just one app specific bundle — AppBundle.
You can organize your code neatly using subnamespaces. For example, the backend controllers would go to the AppBundle\Controller\Backend subnamespace.
Note that I'm talking about one app specific bundle — that stuff that's unique to the concrete app and won't make sense to reuse elsewhere. You can still develop separate bundles for reusable stuff and put them into the vendors infrastructure.
Keep non Symfony specific stuff out of bundles. There is no need to have a bundle for the model and the Service Layer classes in a bundle if they are not Symfony2 specific. See this question and my answer for further details.
Like Elnur said, use one AppBundle is a good practice.
A single bundle implements the MVC pattern himself so i think it's not a good idea to use bundles to separate your layers.
I think the best way to use bundles is to think "open source". If the feature you are developping is enough generic to be released for everyone, or to be reused in a future project, place this feature in a bundle.
This way will force you to build the feature without any business rule which belong in your AppBundle.
Bundles are bricks
There are different ways to organise application structure for your projects. But if you want to distribute your bundles and follow symfony best practices, then bundles are more features than separation of UI. More about bundles read in documentation.
I have two projects with the following structures, both valid I think:
making a bundle for each feature: BlogBundle, StoreBundle and so on,
and AppBundle that contains general stuff. No Backend/Frontend
separation. It's SaaS where backend is frontend in most cases.
One bundle for frontend, one for backend. They share only entities
and domain specific stuff. The application has two different ends.
I started using Symfony 2 after having experience with 5 php frameworks like Zend, CodeIgniter, Fuel, Yii and Cake. I am very confused on how to structure my project as better as I can. First of all I am confused in working with bundles. Bundles are some kind of modules used in other frameworks? Bascially I have my application and everything until now is stored in a bundles. If I want to make some helper functions and some libraries and abstract classes, I just make a new bundle for those?
See the Bundle Structure and Best Practices cookbook entry for basic ideas on the structure of a bundle.
I recommend having just one app specific bundle. I call it AppBundle.
Also, you don't have to have everything in bundles. Check this question for details.
Lots of other discussions on that matter:
Should everything really be a bundle on Symfony 2?
Confused with symfony2 bundles
I am looking to reduce redundancies in code shared across entire web sites. I have tinkered with several frameworks but cannot think of any that allow you to EASILY separate the framework code from the site code while sharing it to multiple sites at the same time.
What PHP frameworks can do this easily?
EDIT - I am trying to determine which frameworks are the easiest to share.. I was already guessing that nearly all could be shared, but which frameworks are geared towards sharing? It sounds like Yii recommends placing the framework code outside the site code, that is a good start.
If someone is sharing the same framework code across sites already, I would love to know about that.
It's pretty easy to do that with Fuel (http://fuelphp.com).
Each website has an index.php where some paths are defined:
/**
* Set all the paths here
*/
$app_path = '../fuel/app/';
$package_path = '../fuel/packages/';
$core_path = '../fuel/core/';
As you can see, you may share the core and packages in a central repository and create a single app and public folders to each web site.
You may even share an app with different web sites customizing stuff (let's say, the site title or the database used) by just setting a different environment in the .htaccess. That works out-of-the-box for development/stage/production sites, for example, but may be extended to anything. You may also setup central packages to use in multiple apps. Powerful, easy and just works.
Many can do this. For instance YII is supposed to be installed OUTSIDE of your www-root directory (httpdocs, /var/www/ or something like that). You can use several sites to point to that base dir.
Any framework (or part) that does not need specific settings for your site can be shared among multiple sites I guess.
I believe Zend can do what you ask, possibly even Symfony and Fuel, and I'm sure many other frameworks that allow you to pick what parts of it to use will let you do this.
However, doing so will require you to do a little more configuring to get it all running. Which is kind of why I ended up creating my own framework.
Symfony does. I love the Symfony framework, and it comes with some great frameworks. You might like the Routing and YAML ones. A person I know calls Symfony the best php framework.
Symfony components
Some of the components have their own specific sites
You can find a really good documentation here.
Symfony2 is suitable for your needs. It's a full stack framework with a lot of standalone components. It works with "bundles", a bundle is a kind of container with a complete logic (controllers, model objects, views, assets, configuration, ...). That means you write one bundle and you can reuse it without any problem.
But you can also consider symfony 1.4. One project can handles many applications so your model is shared across these applications and the same code can be reused in all applications. Note an application can be a complete website.
I can't think of any frameworks that do this natively, but you could use several SVN (or hg, etc) repositories to accomplish this. Example using CakePHP:
1 repo has the CakePHP default files. If you wish to update CakePHP,
you update this repo in the future.
1 repo per website that stores everything inside your app folder.
It's not built in functionality, but it isn't very difficult to setup either.
I'm just working through the Symfony2 Bible and I'm a little stuck on the bundle system. It is a great feature but I'm not quite sure how to split my flat PHP application into bundles. It's my first time splitting my PHP code into a full featured MVC framework.
I'm working on a few online games (based on PHP) but how would I define the bundles ? Is it like one single onlinegame1 bundle with all the controllers and functions - Or like a login bundle, a register bundle, a war bundle - summarized one bundle for every single PHP file I got ?
I want to start clean and correct but I'm not quite sure if I understand that feature.
You could think of bundle as an independent reusable component - in most of the cases at least.
Let's imagine a personal blog website. I'd split it into ArticleBundle, UserBundle, CommentBundle and finally MainBundle which would stick all these other bundles together, creating your website. The main point is that you can take for example ArticleBundle and reuse it easily on other project without it being tied to any other bundle.
From Symfony2 book:
A bundle is similar to a plugin in other software, but even better.
The key difference is that everything is a bundle in Symfony2,
including both the core framework functionality and the code written
for your application. Bundles are first-class citizens in Symfony2.
This gives you the flexibility to use pre-built features packaged in
third-party bundles or to distribute your own bundles. It makes it
easy to pick and choose which features to enable in your application
and to optimize them the way you want.