Wojciech Sznapka Blog – PHP / Symfony 2 / Open Source

Is Symfony2 a MVC framework?

4 November 2012

Is Symfony2 a MVC framework? This question in tricky and you can’t see answer at the first moment when you visit symfony.com website. Even more – MVC pattern isn’t mentioned in elevator pitches in “What is Symfony” section. Most of PHP developers will tell you promptly, that this is Model View Controller implementation without a doubt.

The question is: where is Model layer in Symfony2? My answer is: there’s ain’t one and it’s good..

Symfony2 isn’t hardly bounded with Model layer, as it could have been seen in first version. We can see many Active Record model implementations in modern web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django and symfony 1. I’m not saying those solutions are bad. The main problem was, that big systems maintained by plenty of developers changing over time tends to have a messy codebase. The common place to locate business logic were Model layer. The result of that approach were huge model classes, randomly structured Table/Peer classes full of static method and general feeling that system is hardly impossible to maintain anymore.

The problem: complex systems

Nowadays Internet and business needs agile team working on sophisticated and higly complicated systems. Simple problems were solved years ago. If one wants to make a success with his web application, he needs to solve tough problems. Those systems are impossible to be produced with old fashioned Watterfall software development process. Something better fitting should taken into the consideration to adapt to current conditions. Most of development process can be covered by agile tools such a Scrum or Kanban.

All those cases, from architectural point of view, could be solved by Domain Driven Design

The solution: Domain Driven Design

It’s a approach and way of thinking about complex systems. It supports best known design patterns, good separation of concerns, agility and good communication layer between technical and business people, for example by using ubiquitous language.

So if you ask, where should I look for a Model in Symfony2 projects, I’ll tell you: look for it around the domain. Symfony2 has plenty of capabilities that could be used for developing system with DDD approach, I’ll name just a few of them.

Let’s meet at PHPCon 2012

16 August 2012

During upcoming edition of PHPCon 2012 in Kielce I’ll give a talk “Symfony2 w chmurze” (Symfony2 in the cloud). I’ll describe advantages of cloud infrastructure purposed for web applications, some use cases of cloud deployments and things which developers need to keep in mind, to get Symfony2 application work properly in such environment.

More informations are available in PHPCon agenda:http://phpcon.pl/2012/pl/agenda

See you there :-)

Deploying Symfony2 applications with Ant

20 April 2012

When you have plenty of Symfony2 applications and you need to deploy them from time to time, you are probably sick of thinking about every activity you need to do for every deploy. Often people use some build scripts, which are hard to maintain and tends to be unreadable. I wanted to automate it as much as it possible and I’ve choosen Ant, to help me out.

Actually Ant is choice, due to other fact – it can be easily used with Continous Integration server like Jenkins, while ssh scripts often generates some problems. With this aproach all you need to have Ant binary on server and build.xml config in root folder. You can have different targets defined in config and chain them using depend attribute. So in this case you can have target for building project on production server (usefull for continous delivery) and setup for Jenkins.

Modern frameworks comparison

18 January 2012

How many times were you curious which one of, modern web frameworks is the best? For developers who have their favourite, answer is simple. But there are plenty of questions from begginers or devs who want to learn new technology, wondering which one should take, to stay on the edge.

Why Mockery is better than PHPUnit Mock Builder and how to integrate it with Symfony2

1 November 2011

Recently I did a lot of Test Driven Development on my Symfony2 bundle. I used PHPUnit’s built-in mocks and stubs for many projects, so I took it again. But while I was working on mocking Symfony2 core objects I found those mocks very uncomfortable in use. I tried Mockery and it saved my day. Let’s see how to get it working with Symfony2 and how it kicks ass!

Use Proxy-Object in Symfony2 applictions to test non-public methods

23 October 2011

Generally, it’s not a good idea to unit test protected or private methods, but in some cases it could be useful. Of course we don’t want to change our class contract, and expose those methods as a public ones, just becasue we want to test them with PHPUnit. This case can be solved with Proxy-Object library. It provides easy-to-use way to get protected classes to the surface. More about that is here http://blog.bastian-feder.de/blog/029_proxyObject.html. Here I’ll show how to integrate proxy object into your Symfony2 application:

How to add a custom class to form field in Symfony2

18 October 2011

Today I needed to add a custom class to textarea field, to achieve TinyMCE field rendering (with help of http://symfony2bundles.org/stfalcon/TinymceBundle). It wasn’t such straightforward like I thought… I tried:

But it threw exception, that attribute “class” is undefined, so I need to solve it in other way. Thank god I use Twig, so I tried form theming (in template with form). Only thing you need to do is to find out html ID of the textarea field (in my case: wowo_bundle_newsletterbundle_newslettertype_mailing_body). Then you need to add a “_” on the front and “_widget” on the end and class=”tinymce” is there for you.

The solution is simple and powerful, Symfony2 has proven its quality again :-)

UPDATE 19.10.2011
As Florian and Stloyd mentioned in comments, setting custom class can be done in elegant way, which ain’t included in the documentation yet.

UPDATE 29.10.2011

After my contribution, “attr” element is now documented in official Symfony2 docs http://symfony.com/doc/current/reference/forms/types/field.html

Loosening dependencies with closures in PHP

27 September 2011

Today I ran into a little issue: how to pass generic logger object to method? I wanted to get some verbose output from method, which I call from Command, but onc time it should log with Symfony2 OutputInterface and other time it should use monolog logger. Of course I can make some wrapper class for both of them, but it would be kind of an overkill. The Closure from PHP 5.3 came with solution. In calling method I created closure like this:

On the second hand I’ve got:

As you can see I don’t need to care about logging – just call the closure with message and it will log it properly, depending on context.

Moja prezentacja o Symfony2 i dedykowanym oprogramowaniu z InternetBeta 2011

15 September 2011

Poniżej slajdy z mojej prezentacji, którą wygłosiłem na InternetBeta 2011 w Rzeszowie. Zapraszam do zapoznania się z slajdami.

Symfony2 stable is available, what’s the big deal?

7 August 2011

On July 28th Symfony2 was finally released, with launch parties all over the world. Developers are excited, managers are excited and whole ecosystem is happy. They’re right, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. symfony 1.x is a great framework, I made many  projects with it, nevertheless Symfony2 is a new way of doing things in PHP. I observe, that applications made with symfony 1 tends to be messy with raising number of functionalities. There too many magic tricks, which you can use, which are hard to manage in big, multi-team projects. Symfony2 does it smarter.