A Pragmatic Look At Symfony The PHP5 framework by Darren Beale

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A Pragmatic Look At Symfony(The PHP5
framework)by Darren Beale

• Skillswap Bristol - 26th July 2007

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Who am I?

• Front-end PHP Developer since 1998
• Owner/Manager of Siftware Ltd in
  Upton-upon-Severn
• Siftware is 1 yr old provides outsourced web
  dev services to design and development agencies
• The business thing is starting to interest me
  more than the tech
• Previous to Siftware I spent 8 years in London
• 4 years as contractor/employee
• Front-end (inc Flash), PHP, Coldfusion and 1 year
  as nix sysadmin
• 4 years as owner/manager of Exponetic Ltd in
  Bethnal Green
• Grew it up to 8 staff then exited
• It is still going strong
• Underscore member all that time, although
• I left Bristol within months of subscribing
• I dont post as much as I used to
• This is my first meeting, hello!

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What about you?

• wave them like you just dont care
• How many of you are techies?
• How many do mostly PHP dev?
• Do any of you use frameworks?
• Symfony?

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Whats Ill be covering

• Why use a framework?
• Intro to Symfony
• Symfonys MVC implementation
• Coding a simple web application from scratch
• Areas for Improvement
• Summary
• What next?

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Why use a framework?

• Factors out common patterns
• Code layout
• Config
• URL routing
• Authentication and Security
• Form validation
• Internationalisation/Localisation
• Encourages good design and allows one to easily
  utilise best practices

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Intro to Symfony

• symfony-project.com
• Written in PHP5
• Superb documentation
• including a couple of sample applications
• The book is open source and available online
• Forums, wiki, mailing list as one would expect
• Lots of plugins including
• CMS
• Forum
• Blog

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Intro to Symfony cont

• Recommended configuration
• Apache with mod_rewrite
• PHP5.2.x
• Simple to install
• Pear
• gt pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
• gt pear install symfony/symfony
• Apache, add alias in your VirtualHost, e.g.
• Alias /sf /usr/share/php/data/symfony/web/sf

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Intro to Symfony cont

• Minimal dependencies, all included
• Creole
• Database Abstraction
• Support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MSSQL
• Propel
• Object Relationship Mapping
• About to officially support Doctrine too but can
  already use via plugin
• PAKE
• Library for easy command line tasks
• LIME
• Library for easy unit and functional testing
• Plus
• Prototype
• Script.aculo.us
• TinyMCE (WYSIWYG)
• DynArch.com Rich Calendar

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Symfonys MVC implementation

• Model
• Data access and manipulation
• Based on Propel (by default)
• Built in tools for pagination, sorting and
  filters
• Model can be configured using XML or YAML
• Symfony builds your model for you!
• gt symfony propel-build-model
• Symfony provides classes ready for you to extend
  your model

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Symfonys MVC implementation cont

• View
• Presentation layer
• Global layout and configuration
• Each action can have its own sub template
• View config can go down as low as actions
• Symfony uses PHP as its templating language
• Theres a Smarty plugin
• Partials and Slots
• Template fragments without business logic
• Components
• Template fragments with business logic

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Symfonys MVC implementation cont

• Controller
• Routes the business logic
• Each module has a controller class with a
  number of action methods
• Automatic conversion of the URL into the
  appropriate module/action
• Pre and post execute methods

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Lots of coding

• Lets get our hands dirty
• Dev environment is Windows XP (sorry) with Debian
  server running under VMWare with Apache, PHP,
  MySQL and Samba
• Apache document root is a Samba share mapped as a
  drive
• The app Im going to build is very simple. I had
  bigger plans but I de-scoped as I went along

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Summary

• We talked about
• Why frameworks are A Good Thing
• Intro to Symfony
• Symfonys MVC implementation
• Coding a simple web application from scratch
• Areas for Improvement

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Areas for Improvement

• I think Symfony is superb and has got a huge
  amount going for it
• That said, there are a few area that niggle me
• Some of the build process is a bit flakey
• Well it is for me anyway
• Especially around refactoring
• Seems a bit magic sometimes
• But one could argue thats the point
• Forums and mailing lists are not always
  particularly helpful
• They seem to be more helpful when you know what
  youre talking about (e.g. the documentation is
  already superb, go read that)
• Some would argue this as a positive as it leaves
  the mailing lists free of noise

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What next?

• For more information
• Symfony-project.com
• Try the sample application there or Askeet! the
  24 day sample project
• Feel free to email me with questions
• darren.beale_at_siftware.co.uk
• Ill put these slides up on http//bealers.com
  along with the code

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• ltpowerpoint /gt