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.
Related
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.
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 starting to familiarize myself with using the module-based architecture for zend framework projects. My real reason behind being interested in the module architecture is to be able to take a module from one project and just drop it into another project. Maybe I'm not getting it right..
But what I'm noticing right off the bat is that controllers within each module cannot have the same name as any other controller in the main application (or in any other module, though I haven't tested this). This leads me to think that modules are not really independent self-contained units, so I wonder how this affects their ease of distribution from one project to another.
The other issue is what if I were to take a module and drop it into another project. Do I have to update the .zfproject.xml manually? and wouldn't that be a bit too cumbersome to be done manually?
Maybe I'm not clear on how modules should be used in zend, so I'd like to know when you decide it's best to use them, and when do you decide not to use them, or do you use them all the time, or do you never use them?
I always used module based architecture so far in my projects, because I like to separate concepts. For example I have always an ADMIN module whose classes and controllers dont mix with the rest of the application. Using modules you can reuse modules for other applications, for example if you create a BLOG module.
The names of your controllers will be something like Admin_IndexController for the admin module even if the file is named IndexController.php.
Another concept that is nice and help you reuse resources is the plugins. Use them for authentication or to check validity of the requests.
You need to setup namespaces for your modules so that they are easily moved into a new project without renaming.
If you are using Zend Tool then you will have to edit the zfproject.xml. I haven't spent a lot of time using this so I'm not sure if there is another way without manually editing.
Besides the obvious 'admin' and 'blog' use cases for a module structure in Zend Framework are there any reasons or guidelines to use Modules? I feel drawn to use modules, but I'm not sure how I would split my web app up into modules.
Can you suggestion some instances where using modules would be beneficial?
Modules are good when you want to reuse them across multiple applications, or when a piece of the application is large enough that it warrants separation into its own chunk. Rather than having a bunch of unrelated controllers in one directory, the module allows you to split up the MVCs into related chunks.
We use modules all the time; our clients frequently pick and choose between the available modules to package an application. We also introduced module dependencies, so that modules may rely on each other.
As a general rule, when our applications have a high level subfolder, unless they have only a couple pages, they are modules. For example, About would only be a controller and a view within the application, but forum might be its own module.
I have way too many modules in my application. Currently my modules are namespaced, but what I'd like to do is have a directory structure so I can get rid of this redundant and annoying namespacing.
For instance, for modules named "xModule1, xModule2, xModule3", I'd like to have a directory structure like this:
-x
-module1
-actions and templates
-module2
-actions and templates
-module3
- actions and templates
Surely the developers at symfony know that people would like to use their framework to develop large applications. So how is module organization like this done?
I've done a lot of work in Java/Spring, and because source is component scanned, you can arrange your controllers and jsp files in nicely organized hierarchies. Is this somehow possible with Symfony?
No, this is not possible with Symfony. The structure of your modules and their actions and templates is expected in a fixed file system layout and I haven't heard anything about that changing.
I've run into the same problem you're facing where a very large site ended up with 30+ modules in a single application. At first it seemed cumbersome but after dealing with it for a while I found that the single location to search for a specific module was in fact beneficial instead of having to guess through sub-structures until I got what I was after. Seeing that structure grow and grow also pushes me to respect adding new modules only when it's absolutely necessary, folding new functionality into existing modules and refactoring existing modules to work with new enhancements whenever possible.
Symfony does have auto-loading features that will work for your library folders however, allowing you to have lib/one/two/three/Object.class.php or any other structure you see fit.
If you have so many modules, you could consider to move some functionality into plugins (i.e. create your own plugins).
The benefit is that you can use this functionality also in other projects.
Or you can group your modules into applications. You can have as many applications as you want, not only backend and frontend.
I've wondered about the same thing, especially as many configuration files need to be set either at application level or individual module level. It could useful to be able to cascade configurations to a set of modules.
As mentioned above, it seems the available solutions are:
deal with lots of modules
create separate applications (which will create some wieldy duplication)
refactor your modules to be as efficient as practical (i.e. multiple controllers & views per module)