How Symfony Changed My Life

Matthias Noback Lelystad, September 1st 2015

10

years!

How Symfony changed my life

Pre-symfony

From ASP using VBScript and a MS Access database

To PHP with a MySQL database

"You should try PHP!"

From include('script.php')

To proper function calls

From PHP 4 and one mega Page class

To PHP 5 with proper scoping for methods and properties, and autoloading

From PHP & HTML in the same file

To PHP classes and Smarty template files

From copying snippets from the Internet

To downloading single-purpose libraries

Feeling mighty fine

SQL injection

Register globals

Session hijacking

Magic quotes

CSRF

XSS

Basically...

But... performance was very good ;)

Driebit (2008)

symfony (1)with a lower-case s

Symfony Camp (2007)

Stefan Koopmanschap

The Book (back then)

François Zaninotto(Propel)

symfony 1.1

Working with symfony 1 meant...

MVC

Fat controllers

Fat models

(Zend devs wrote fat services as well)

Not in the controller or the model?

Put it in:

A "peer" class

A utility class

Or: create a global singleton for it

What's a singleton?

Static

Global

Single instance

class Singleton{ private static $instance; private function __construct() { } public static function getInsta

nce()

{ if (self::$instance === nul

l) {

self::$instance = new self();

} return self::$instance; }}

God object

sfContext::getInstance()

getUser(), getResponse(), getRequest(), getLogger(), getI18N(), ...

Just reach out

Why bad?

Testability

Isolation

Side-effects

Configuration

No separation of concerns

CTO at SensioLabs DE

Pushing the limits

Tweaking symfony

Event listeners: add missing methods on the fly (!)

Filters: chain of responsibility

factories.yml and other config files

Switch to Doctrine

It was... new

version 1.0

Develop some Plugins

Learn about advanced topics

Emails

Forms

Doctrine

Internals

SymfonyLive Paris 2010

Revealing Symfony2

SymfonyLive Paris 2011

Almost releasing Symfony 2.0

Excitement all over the place

Start using 2.0?

No backwards compatibility

No best practices

No CMS

Not even...

... an admin

generator

only for scaffolding ;)

Migrating to 2.0?

Company owners didn't dare to take the step (I agree with them now!)

I left the company :)

Symfony2

capital "S"

no space, for Google

Infrastructure

1. Git for version control

2. Install script or Git submodules for vendor code

3. At some point: composer started handling dependencies

TemplatingTwig:

Own syntax

No PHP code

"Auto-safe"

Fast (the engine that is)

"Templating engines in PHP" by Fabien Potencier

Dependency injection container

Major improvement: everything can be configured

No runtime resolvers anymore

What's dependency injection?

class Foo{ private $bar; public function __construct(Bar

$bar)

{ $this->bar = $bar; }}

What's a DI container?

class Container{ public function createFoo() { return new Foo($this->getBar()); } private function createBar() { return new Bar(); }}

What does DI give us?

Single responsibility

Testability

Dependency inversion

SpeedFlexibility

Active record -> data mapper

Doctrine 1/Propel

Doctrine 2/...

Active record sample

class Invoice extends Record{ } $invoice = new Invoice();$invoice->save();

Data mapper sample

class Invoice{ } $invoice = new Invoice();$entityManager->persist($invoice);

POPO

Why is that better?

Isolation

Model first

Decoupling (not always a good reason)

Bundle ~= Plugin

First-class citizens

A bundle for each feature

Framework coupling

Libraries are framework-independent

Bundles are explicitly meant to couple code to the framework

Bundles: service definitions

Service definition files

Bundle extension

Bundle configuration

Compiler pass

Bundle: root for resources

@MyBundle/Resources/views/template.html.twig

Resources

Expose: Templates

Translations ...

AssetsAssetic

Separate tools (non-PHP based)

SecuritySo very hard

Documented in many different ways

It's really good though

Simplified at code level now

Symfony is an early adopter

PHP-FIG

PSR-0, PSR-1, PSR-2, PSR-3, PSR-7 - very quickly adopted

Extensive documentation

High quality

Friendly

Good-looking

Well maintained

"The Book"?

Excellent BC promise

@api

A Year With Symfony

Struggling with framework coupling

The fight against CRUD

Hexagonal architecture

phparchitecturetour.com

Conclusion

Symfony - The biggest change

Dependency injection (container)

Which is an enabler for better code

Because: maintainable and testable

My personal development:

1. I love symfony

2. I love Symfony2

3. I want to decouple from it

4. I want to fully embrace it whenever that's okay

For me it's about

Knowing your framework

Being fast with it

Not being totally dependent on it

Long live PolderPHP!