Symfony2 bundles: am I using them right? - php

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.

Related

Symfony: Organising multi-client application’s business logic

Problem:
I’m unsure how to set up multi client application for Symfony so that we would not violate Symfony's best practices and work against the framework.
I would like to have one main Core namespace which would contain all the base model classes. Right next to the core I would like to set up client specific namespaces which would be used, based on client regional setting. For example LocalUS for US market, LocalUK, for UK market etc.
The Local* namespaces should take first priority for including twig templates, and as a fallback use core common shared views (as I understand, this is solvable via twig namespaces). Same goes for controllers and models - these are probably solvable via extending the Core namespaced classes? Is this all solvable via routing and providing paths for these Local* controllers?
I was looking up on github to see if there are any project that have similar setup but I couldn’t find anything.
A little background:
We have an older legacy PHP Application which was built in-house from ground up using plain PHP. As the application has grown over time, it has become hard to maintain good code quality and standards. It’s also very time consuming to teach new developers our application logic, since the application basically follows no standard design patterns and just does it’s own thing. A lot of the underlying code which handles routes, controllers etc seems to work like “magic” that nobody really dares to touch.
It is because of that we would like to migrate our application to Symfony3 framework. I’ve read some articles about the overall process of migrating legacy applications to symfony, and managed to do it with silex pretty well. Silex, however is a bit too lightweight, I found that the assetic service provider had a lot of functionality missing (twig namespacing etc), and decided it would be best if we could move to a full stack symfony framework instead.
Look into Symfony bundles - they do exactly what you need. You create a "base" bundle, than extend it with other bundles. That's how FOSUserBundle works - it provides everything you need, than you extend it and overwrite it.

Symfony MVC best practice for controllers

In a Symfony/Doctrine/PHP-project, a client is complaining that we've broken software development best practices. The complaint is about improper layering of the source code, and the lack of unit tests.
This is a sub $50k-project.
I believe that the client has an expert from the Java world, perhaps Spring Framework, looking at the source code.
We've been using proper MVC, as we see it.
View-logic is handled entirely by TWIG.
Database is handled entirely by Doctrine.
We're using Symfony Security for access control ($this->get('security.context')->isGranted('ROLE_ADMIN') and $this->get('security.context')->getToken()->getUser().
Beware that Symfony has changed the model a bit, since we started this project - but remains backward compatible.
In the controller the customer is specifically saying that it's wrong for the controller to handle:
Access Control (via Symfony Security)
Database Queries (via Doctrine)
"Parsing and other logic" for sending back responses (return $this->render('some_template.html.twig');)
The question
The client is saying that best practices is for the controller to simply pass on requests to another layer further down in the system.
Further he's saying that user-admin is based on a "custom model" where all users and roles are stored in the database - which makes plugging in a different access control system difficult. Specifically because role names seems to be hard coded such as via commands such as ($this->get('security.context')->isGranted('ROLE_ADMIN').
So; is there a definitive best practice on this field? What belongs in the controller, and is Doctrine, Twig, Symfony Security "sufficiently" a separate layer "below the controller".
Should there be yet another layer between the controller and Doctrine for example?
Source: http://fabien.potencier.org/what-is-symfony2.html
First, what is Symfony2?
First, Symfony2 is a reusable set of standalone, decoupled, and cohesive PHP components that solve common web development problems.
Then, based on these components, Symfony2 is also a full-stack web framework.
Depending on your project and depending on your needs, you can either pick and choose some of the Symfony2 components and start your project with them, or you can use the full-stack framework and benefit from the tight integration it provides out of the box. And choosing between the two different approaches is really up to you.
Is Symfony2 an MVC framework?
Symfony2 is really about providing the tools for the Controller part, the View part, but not the Model part. It's up to you to create your model by hand or use any other tool, like an ORM. Of course, tight integration exists for the most well known ORMs like Doctrine2 and Propel; but they are optional dependencies. The Symfony2 core features do not and will never rely on any ORM.
Symfony2 is an HTTP framework; it is a Request/Response framework. That's the big deal. The fundamental principles of Symfony2 are centered around the HTTP specification.
Symfony about best practices: https://symfony.com/doc/current/best_practices.html
You should rly read this about controller best practices:
https://symfony.com/doc/current/best_practices.html#controllers
You can read this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/21701890/2160958

Admin Routes (Nested Controllers or Bundles)

I'm studying the Laravel 3, 1 week ago, but didn't understand everything about the routes.
My main question is: how to create administrative routes?
In the video lessons from Jeffrey Way (Tuts Premium), I could understand two things about it:
Nested Controllers (/application/controllers/admin/user.php)
Bundles (/bundles/user.php) - He did not say much about it.
Anyway, I noticed 2 things (obvious):
On both sides, I can have a route / admin / whatever.
But what the correct way?
I'm really very confused.
Laravel bundles are for developing modular code that you can reuse from application to application in Laravel. The Bundle itself is very much the same as the 'application' directory you have as standard in a Laravel install, allowing you to create modular sub applications within your project. I highly recommend you avoid bundles for the moment entirely and focus on learning the core functionality of Laravel.
For your needs, place your routes within your routes.php file within the application directory and nest them to your hearts content. This will serve your purposes fine. If you're not building/using bundles, you don't need to use bundle routes.
When you're comfortable with Laravels routing and you've built one or two apps you may well have an idea for a bundle that will help you develop your apps faster in the future. This is the time to start learning about bundle routing as it's the only way to link your application logic with your bundle and provide it with a URL schema.
Hope that helps.
Neither way is really right or wrong, the beauty of Laravel is that there are so many ways to achieve the same thing so it's up to the developer to choose what works for them.
Personally I started by using nested controllers as they're much easier to get up and running. I would however recommend making the move to bundles. If you plan on sticking with Laravel (and you should) then it would make sense to build a bundle that includes the auth and components you use in each project already setup. That way you just need install the bundle and you're good to go.

Symfony2 Bundle System

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.

Best way to package a general-purpose zend module

As our company starts using Zend Framework as the base framework for most of our projects, we want to share some common elements across all our projects. I talk about things like:
An implementation of a model (based on doctrine2)
RBAC for the model, including user, group, role models
A xml-based templating engine for ajax backend interfaces
(you name it) ...
Basically, all things to put "zend on rails" and get going. What is the best way to package these components? I see two possibilities:
As modules
We include the necessary functions as separate modules into the modules folder.
Pro:
We can set routes and execute code, which is good for many modules (imaginary example: a paypal module needs some kind of callback url. If our module can set it up on its own, no configuration from the "project developer" is needed).
We can provide real functionality (like the user administration) out of the box
We have a bootstrap to set up autoloading and doctrine etc.
Con:
Bad place? Interferes with the users project
A little harder to share between projects (git submodules instead of classpath)
In the library folder
We put it in the library folder and point the classpath to it.
Pro:
Clean solution
Sharing across projects
Con:
Bootstrap has to be explicitly called
No direct routing or actions - everything has to be proxied through the concrete project
So, how do you solve this? Where do you put your reusable, general purpose stuff in zf?
I think you should use both approaches.
When developing "library-like" code, as in kind of "infrastructure" classes and other things that are reusable (like ZF's own components, Doctrine 2's components etc.), you can put them into the library directory. (or its own entirely separate project)
When developing actual ZF modules (like an auth module for example), then format the code around the ZF module structure.
I think by using this kind of approach you get all the benfits you listed, and pretty much none of the cons :)
As one additional idea, if you develop your architecture parts as "services", you could even keep them running as their own web service endpoints.

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