Symfony Project: What do you use symfony for?
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The symfony project asks the community on their blog what sorts of projects they're using the framework for:    We are trying to get a better view of the use of symfony, and of what people think are its strongest and weakest points.   If you have five minutes to spare, we'd love to have your feedback on the matter. There is a poll thread in the forum where you can express your opinion.    If you're a user of the symfony framework, be sure to head over to the post and grab the list of questions they'd like to hear about. Tons of developers have already responded, so add your answers today!
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Jason Gilmore dropped us a line to point out the latest edition of his series on this time focusing on form validation with Prototype and a different framework than before, symfony.   These tutorials focused on the increasingly popular CakePHP framework, however in this installment I'll switch gears a bit and instead examine my preferred framework solution: symfony. Specifically, I'll show you how symfony's built-in support for the Prototype JavaScript framework can greatly enhance the user experience within your applications.   Jason introduces the Prototype library and a simple version of how it's used with a form to do a little validation. The next step is integrating it with something useful - a site built up inside the symfony framework (you'll need to know how to use it already).
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Reinhold Weber has put together a list of signs (40 in all on his "programming list of shame") that you're a lousy PHP programmer. Here's a sampling:   don't see the need and/or benefits of a good programming IDE like Zend Studio or Eclipse PDT have never used some form of version control like Subclipse don't use a consistent methodology don't use test-driven development don't return content but echo or print it from your functions or classes return HTML, not data, strings, or objects. don't allow intelligent error handling you think reusable software equals/requires your code to be OOP   Now granted, some of them are a bit more high level than others, but if you're not headed towards a lot of these, you might change paths, hop out of that comfort zone and branch out into the community and the language a little bit more.
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As both Andrei Zmievski and Clay Loveless mention in new blog posts from each, things in the PHP framework scene are getting a bit out of hand.   Andrei's comments:   I know you might be lusting after Rails for some reason and want to have the fame, the glory, and the dancing girls of DHH, but are we not going to be satisifed until Sourceforge is filled with the object-oriented diarrheal remains of our overblown egos and delusions of grandeur?   And Clay's thoughts:   Build a cool app. Forget about your own personal stamp on the framework world; you missed the boat on that one. But, if you want to make a mark, the world is wide open for new and cool applications. Pick an existing framework, start building your app, and contribute fixes back to that framework's community as you find shortcomings in your needs for your app.   They're both in agreement, and on more that one point. They recommend the best course of action for anyone out there with "the itch" to really work with a framework - fine one of the already established ones and dive right in. It might not be your own code, but you can contribute your own functionality and thoughts into the project and establish your own little niche.
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On reading a message on the CakePHP mailing list about the web services built into the framework, Chris Hartjes decided to embark on his own look at what functionality the framework offers and how easy it is to use.   Might I add that until I tried this, I had never built a web service with CakePHP before. I found that by turning on the debug mode and actually following the instructions that were in the error messages (best undocumented feature of CakePHP if you ask me) I was able to build.   His code, while it worked, was one-upped by another's submitted to the mailing list (Samuel DeVore) so he's included that code in his example rather than the original. His example makes a TestController, an XmlComponent, and an XmlHelper to vary the output from a normal HTML to an XML format based on if "xml" is included in the path of the location.
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted episode #32 of their popular PHP podcast series (PHP Abstract) - "Introduction to symfony" as hosted by Stefan Koopmanschap.   Today's special guest is Stefan Koopmanschap. Stefan is web application developer and professional services consultant for Ibuildings.nl. He is the initiator of the SymfonyCamp event in 2007, and is also trying to promote symfony in The Netherlands with his local website symfony-framework.nl. His own website can be found at www.leftontheweb.com   You know the drill - there's three ways to get this latest and greatest show:   listen on the web via the embeded player Download the mp3 for immediate satisfaction Subscribe to their feed in your aggregator of choice
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Hasin Hayder has a post about their "yet another framework" they're about to release to the community - Orchid.   Orchid is still in preview state and we are planning to release it by the mid of January. But if you are interested you can check the orchid blog and checkout the nightly build version from svn repository. Orchid is very fast and lightweight and really painless to kickstart the development.   He includes a features list of some of the things it offers so far including segregated template components, partial caching, support for PDO, an included unit testing library and bundled libraries for Google Maps, Charts and JSON.
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On the Synfony project's blog, they've posted about a new testing framework that they've implemented for their framework based around something they call "lime".    If you keep an eye on the timeline, you probably saw that the symfony unit tests have been completely reworked lately. This is because we switched from simpletest, which was fine but had side effects when functional tests were executed all at once, to our own testing framework, lime.   Lime is more lighweight than PHPUnit or simpletest and has several advantages. First, it launches test files in a sandbox to avoid strange effects between each test file run (one of the reasons we were unable to fix the old symfony core tests). It also introduces a new sfBrowser, sfTestBrowser and more importantly sfDomCssSelectorBrowser that allow you to write functionnal tests with ease. It is not backward compatible but is a lot more powerful than the old system. Oh, and it holds in a single file, lime.php, without any dependence.    They show some examples of its usage (and a note on which tests will need to be updated) as well as the output that would come of it. They've also included some sample tests (in the "test/" folder of the release) if you'd like to check it out more throughly.
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As announced in this new post to the Symfony blog today, "The Definitive Guide to Symfony" book from APress has officially been published. Along with that release comes another - the 1.0 RC1 release of the framework itself.   We are very proud to announce the official release of The Definitive Guide to Symfony, a book that myself and Fabien spent the last months writing. The 490 pages of this book explain all you need to know from starting up symfony to managing a symfony application, with a lot of practical examples and expert tips. It is available in bookstores right now.   The book is released under the GFDL license (it's a free download) and can be purchased at most book retailers.
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Cody Caughlan has created a project that brings one of the popular features of Ruby on Rails to the world of PHP5 - database migrations.   One of the cool things I like about Ruby on Rails is the use of "migrations" for maintaining your DB. Migrations have proven to be pretty handy in keeping a local database in sync with the work of other developers. [...] Because migrations are incremental and they are done in a structured manner, it is a great way of pushing out new DB changes to the production database servers.   His framework, Ruckusing Migrations, is a modular framework that makes use of some of the more advanced features of PHP5. It's portable (via an adapter interface) and uses a generic task interface (task files) to load functionality into the framework. There's also plenty of API hooks to allow for a developer to easily create their own custom operations.   Check out the project homepage for more information.
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A new post to the php.evangelism mailing list has started up a great discussion on something that a lot of users seem to be in favor of - trying to get PHP accepted by Microsoft to be included in its Dynamic Language Runtime environment.   From the inital post:   I am wondering why there isn't any effort in the PHP community to get PHP into the DLR. If nothing, DLR is yet another platform, and for a php programmer it gives one more playground to showcase his skillset. Anyway, my question is whether there would be any community effort to get MS adopt PHP into CLR too. I am sure there is a genuine customer requirement, and enterprises have made quite a bit of investment in PHP and they would all love to be able to take it to the .NET platform.   Responses so far include the pointing out of problems, possibilities like a Zend collaboration and lots of talk on what such a project would entail.
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In filtering through the mass of projects that he's collected around him, Padraic Brady has decided to cut one loose - the Zend Framework package he'd been developing to introduce YAML parsing and functionality to the framework.   I've been going through all those open source projects and cutting the dead weight. [...] One of the victims of this review has been Zend_Yaml. Earlier this morning I found an odd comment on the Zend_Translate_Yaml proposal by Thomas Weidner that he was erasing his proposal on the basis that there had been no progress on Zend_Yaml.   He's removed the proposal from the Zend Framework proposal pages after receiving an email noting that the package would not comply fully to the YAML 1.1 specification and couldn't be included. With the introduction of the Syck extension into PECL, it could support it but Padraic opted to just tell the ZF group about this functionality rather than working on the build himself.
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Patrick Reilly has a new post today encouraging developers out there looking for an opportunity to volunteer in the community to check out the Zend Framework project's many needs.   Most components and subprojects need volunteers to help with documentation, unit test coverage, code reviews, improving integration with other ZF components, and enhancing architecture and design for the purpose of improving extensibility and ease of use with new components. If you see a subject area or component that interests you, please contact any project members currently associated with the component.   The project is starting several wiki "websites" dedicated to each of the components/efforts inside of the main framework project. Areas for these include:  Auth Team Documentation Team MVC Team Web Services Team
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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According to this new post on the Symfony blog the latest version of the framework has hit the shelves - Symfony 1.1.10.   Ladies and gentlemen, after a tremendous sprint, here is the release 1.0.10.   Fixes include modifications to ProjectExport, a problem with sfRouting and magic quotes, a correction to the sfConfigCache usage, the default log file permissions and a revert on some changes to the default time and date formats.   You can grab this latest release here and there's some documentation to get you started.
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Stefan Koopmanschap has pointed out an interesting article over on the CIO magazine website that has some in the PHP community a bit up in arms about comments it makes towards the language.   The article, "You Used PHP to Write WHAT?!", covers the basics of the language - its status in the web programming world, the functionality it offers and the database interfaces it includes. They also include a hit list of reasons PHP is popular and why it's a good choice for your project.   Then things get a little strange - they move from their PHP praise to three things that have more to do with unresearched "facts" than the reality of the language:   Security and PHP Working with PHP and the shell Scaling and PHP (in enterprise environments)   These incorrect assumptions have lead to many comments both from the PHP community and from users of other languages (like Java and ColdFusion) sharing thoughts on the contents of the article and the language in general. Check out the article's comments to see for yourself.
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The results of the latest International PHP Magazine are in and posted today on their site. The question this time was asking developers and visitors alike what they think sucks about PHP.   Choices included "No lexical scoping", "PEAR", and "Worst Configuration System" but one climbed to the top far above the others - "No namespacing". Trailing that at a distant second were two, getting the same number of votes - "No lexical scoping" and "Can't afford a vowel" (hmm, interesting).    Up for this week is a new poll that asks those out there that have used the Symfony framework to cast their votes about what they think is the best feature the project has included. Check it out and cast your vote today...