Hands-on with the Symfony2 Framework

Hands on with
Symfony2
Ryan Weaver
@weaverryan

Who is this dude?
• Co-author of the Symfony2 Docs

• Core Symfony2 contributor

• Founder of KnpLabs US

• Geek, running, Nashville
http://www.twitter.com/weaverryan
http://www.github.com/weaverryan

iostudio
• Advertising & Integrated Marketing Solutions

• A great, growing Nashville tech company

• Hiring good developers (of all backgrounds)
to be part of a dynamic, fun team

http://iostudio.com/careers

KnpLabs
Quality. Innovation. Excitement.

• Your symfony/Symfony2 development experts
• Consulting & application auditing
• Symfony2 Training
• Behind lots of open source initiatives

Symfony2 Training
• Right here in Nashville: May 19th & 20th
• real coding, real project
• Doctrine2, forms, security, caching, etc
• Cool libraries like Assetic, Imagine, Behat
• Lot’s more
• Or join us in New York City: June 6th & 7th

http://bit.ly/symfony-training

What is Symfony2?

Symfony is a PHP
Framework, a Philosophy, and
a Community - all working
together in harmony.

symfony.com/what-is-symfony

Symfony2
• A group of standalone PHP components

• Bundled into a full-service framework

Solves your difﬁcult, redundant problems

... and then stays the hell out of the way

Problems Solved
• Data persistence • Asset Management
(via Doctrine) • Routing
• Security • File+Dir Traversing
• Forms • Translation
• Validation • Dependency Injection
• Templating • Image Manipulation
• Autoloading • Console Tasks
• Logging • Caching

Symfony2 is fast

By way of comparison, Symfony 2.0
is about 3 times faster than Version
1.4 or than Zend Framework 1.10,
while taking up 2 times less memory.

http://symfony.com/six-good-technical-reasons

Symfony2 is full-featured
“Symfony2 is an extremely
full featured, modular, and
crazy fast framework.”
Steve Francia
Vice President of Engineering at OpenSky

spf13.com/post/symfony2

Infinitely Flexible Architecture
“Symfony2 is probably one of the
most ﬂexible PHP frameworks ever
created. You can literally change
everything.”

~ Blog.NewITFarmer.com

http://bit.ly/symfony-new-it-farmer

A huge community of
developers
• 167 core contributors
• 87 documentation contributors
... and counting ...

A huge eco-system of open
source libraries
• 223 open source Symfony2 bundles
• 74 open source Symfony2 projects
... and counting ...

Symfony2Bundles.org

• 223 open source bundles
• 74 open source projects

http://symfony2bundles.org/

Proven Reputation
• One of the most popular PHP frameworks in
the world

• First released in October 2005
• Nearly 100 releases
• Powers a lot of big sites
nationalguard.com, dailymotion.com, exercise.com, shopopensky.com, etc

The “Standard Distribution”
• Symfony offers “distributions” (think Ubuntu)

• The “Standard Distribution” comes with
everything you’ll need + some bonuses

• Fully-functional application
• Intelligent default conﬁguration
• Some demo pages we can play with

Step 1: Get it!

symfony.com/download

Step 2: Unzip it!

$ cd /path/to/webroot

$ tar zxvf /path/to/Symfony_Standard_Vendors_2.0.0PR11.tgz

Step 3: Run it!

http://localhost/Symfony/web/conﬁg.php

Tend to your Garden

•Fix any major problems (e.g. missing libraries,
permissions issues) that Symfony reports

• Then click “Conﬁgure your Symfony
Application online”

Step 3: Conﬁgure it!

Optional: but a
nice interface to
get you started
quickly

Finished!

This *is* your
ﬁrst Symfony2
page

Act 4:

Let’s create some pages

The 3 Steps to a Page
/hello/ryan
Step1: Symfony matches the URL to a route

Step2: Symfony executes the controller (a
PHP function) of the route

Step3: The controller (your code) returns a
Symfony Response object

<h1>Hello ryan!</h1>

Hello {insert-name}!

• Our goal: to create a hello world-like app

• ... and then to make it do all sorts of
interesting things ...

remove half the code, JSON version, security,
caching...

Step1: Symfony matches the
URL to a route
You deﬁne the routes (URLs) of your app

_welcome:

/ pattern: /
defaults: { _controller: AcmeDemoBundle:Welcome:index }

hello_demo:
/hello/ryan pattern: /hello/{name}
defaults: { _controller: AcmeDemoBundle:Meetup:hello }

Homework
Add the following route to
app/conﬁg/routing.yml

hello_demo:
pattern: /hello/{name}

** Routes can also be deﬁned in XML, PHP and as annotations

Step2: Symfony executes the
controller of the route
hello_demo:

Controller Class::method()

AcmeDemoBundleControllerMeetupController::helloAction()

Symfony will execute this PHP method

Homework
Create the controller class:
<?php
// src/Acme/DemoBundle/Controller/MeetupController.php
namespace AcmeDemoBundleController;

use SymfonyBundleFrameworkBundleControllerController;
use SymfonyComponentHttpFoundationResponse;

class MeetupController extends Controller
{
public function helloAction($name)
{
return new Response('Hello '.$name);
}
}

Step 3: The Controller returns
a Symfony Response object

{
}

This is the only requirement of a controller

Routing Placeholders
The route matches URLs like /hello/*
hello_demo:


{
}

And gives you access to the {name} value

It’s Alive!

http://localhost/Symfony/web/app_dev.php/hello/ryan

Rendering a Template
• A template is a tool that you may choose to use

• A template is used to generate “presentation”
code (e.g. HTML)

• Keep your pretty (<div>) code away from your
nerdy ($foo->sendEmail($body)) code

Homework
Render a template in the controller

{
$response = $this->render(
'AcmeDemoBundle:Meetup:hello.html.twig',
array('name' => $name)
);

return $response;
}

Homework
Create the template ﬁle
{# src/Acme/DemoBundle/Resources/views/Meetup/hello.html.twig #}

Hello {{ name }}

This is Twig
Twig is a fast, secure and powerful templating engine

We *LOVE* Twig... but

Symfony2 fully supports Twig and regular
PHP templates

It’s Still Alive!


Dress that Template
• All pages share common elements (header,
footer, sidebar, etc)

• We think about the problem differently: a
template can be decorated by another

template inheritance allows you to build a
base "layout" template that contains all the
common elements of your site and deﬁnes
"blocks" that child templates can override

A base layout ﬁle header
deﬁnes “blocks”

Each block can have
a default value sidebar content

{% block header %}
<h1>Welcome!</h1>
{% endblock %}

The child template “extends” header

the parent

and “overrides” the parent’s sidebar content

blocks

{% block header %}
<h1>Super hello Welcome!</h1>
{% endblock %}

Homework
Make the template extend a base template

{# src/Acme/DemoBundle/Resources/views/Meetup/hello.html.twig #}
{% extends "AcmeDemoBundle::layout.html.twig" %}

{% block title "Hello " ~ name %}

{% block content %}
<h1>Hello {{ name }}!</h1>
{% endblock %}

layout: src/Acme/DemoBundle/Resources/views/layout.html.twig

It’s Beautiful!


Do Less Work
• So far, we have:
• a route
• a controller
• a template

• We can do all of this with even less code

Homework
Change your
app/conﬁg/routing.yml

hello_demo:
resource: "@AcmeDemoBundle/Controller/MeetupController.php"
type: annotation

This now imports routing information from our controller

Homework
Add the route to your controller
/**
* @extra:Route("/hello/{name}", name="hello_demo")
*/
The PHP comments are
{
$response = $this->render(
called “annotations”
array('name' => $name)
Symfony can use annotations to read routing conﬁg
);

return $response;
Your route and controller are in the same place!
}

Annotations
/**
*/
public function helloAction($name) The PHP
{
$response = $this->render( comments are
array('name' => $name) called
);
“annotations”
return $response;
}

Symfony can use annotations to read routing conﬁg
Your route and controller are in the same place!

Remove more code
Instead of rendering the template, tell Symfony
to do it for you
/**
* @extra:Template()
*/
{
return array('name' => $name);
}

/**
* @extra:Template()
*/
{
}

Controller: AcmeDemoBundle:Meetup:hello

Template: AcmeDemoBundle:Meetup:hello.html.twig

Now with less code!


Act 6:

JSON { name: “Ryan” }

Create a JSON API
• We have an HTML version of our page

• How about a JSON version?

Add a _format to the route
/**
* @extra:Route("/hello/{name}.{_format}", defaults={"_format"="html"})
* @extra:Template()
*/
{
}

“/hello/ryan” still works exactly as before

Create a JSON template
{# src/Acme/DemoBundle/Resources/views/Meetup/hello.json.twig #}

{% set arr = { 'name': name } %}

{{ arr | json_encode | raw }}

“/hello/ryan.json” renders a JSON array

{"name":"ryan"}

It’s that simple

To review
• Symfony looks for the value of the special
“_format” routing placeholder

• The _format is used in the name of the
template (hello.json.twig)

• Symfony also returns the proper Content-
Type (application/json)

RestBundle
• For a truly robust solution to RESTful API’s,
see the community-driven RestBundle

https://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/RestBundle

Act 7:

With annotations, you can

Add security
/**
* @extra:Route("/hello/admin/{name}")
* @extra:Secure(roles="ROLE_ADMIN")
* @extra:Template()
*/
public function helloadminAction($name)
{
}

Add caching

/**
* @extra:Route("/hello/{name}.{_format}", defaults={"_format"="html"})
* @extra:Template()
* @extra:Cache(maxage="86400")
*/
{
}

Act 8:

PHP Libraries by the
Symfony Community

Doctrine2
http://www.doctrine-project.org/

• Database Abstraction Library (DBAL)

• Object Relational Mapper (ORM)

• Object Document Mapper (ODM)
--> (for Mongo DB)

Doctrine persists data better than anyone

Assetic
https://github.com/kriswallsmith/assetic
• PHP asset management framework

• Run CSS and JS through ﬁlters
• LESS, SASS and others
• Compress the assets

• Compile CSS and JS into a single ﬁle each

Behat + Mink
http://behat.org/

• Behavioral-driven development framework

• Write human-readable sentences that test
your code (and can be run in a browser)

Gaufrette
https://github.com/knplabs/Gaufrette
• PHP ﬁlesystem abstraction library
// ... setup your filesystem

$content = $filesystem->read('myFile');
$content = 'Hello I am the new content';

$filesystem->write('myFile', $content);

• Read and write from Amazon S3 or FTP like a
local ﬁlesystem

Imagine
https://github.com/avalanche123/Imagine
• PHP Image manipulation library
use ImagineImageBox;
use ImagineImagePoint;

$image->resize(new Box(15, 25))
->rotate(45)
->crop(new Point(0, 0), new Box(45, 45))
->save('/path/to/new/image.jpg');

• Does crazy things and has crazy docs

Silex
http://silex-project.org/
• Microframework built from Symfony2 Components
require_once __DIR__.'/silex.phar';

$app = new SilexApplication();

$app->get('/hello/{name}', function($name) {
return "Hello $name";
});

$app->run();

• That’s your whole app :)

Sonata Admin Bundle
https://github.com/sonata-project/AdminBundle
• Admin generator for Symfony2

Symfony2 is...

• Fast as hell
• Inﬁnitely ﬂexible
• Fully-featured
• Driven by a huge community

• Not released yet...
Release candidate coming very soon...

Thanks!
Questions?
Ryan Weaver
@weaverryan

Symfony2 Training
in Nashville

Join us May 19th & 20th

Hands-on with the Symfony2 Framework

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