Symfony-Zone

Hi all,times are changing. For a lot of my projects I use a JavaScript only Web UI based on toolkits like ExtJs or qooxdoo. These applications are composed of a lot JS-Files located in the web/js folder of the Symfony-project.One of my problems i always had was that I had no chance to use Symfony Helper-Functions in those files. Especially the I18N and URL-Helper functions were missed badly.Over the time I came up with a solution the works great for me. Maybe it is usefull for you too… Continue Reading »

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Hello all,i just updated the errata for my german symfony book, so all know errors are listed. You can find it here. If you have found more errors please tell me, so i can provide all readers of the book with this information. Timo  

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Hi all,i just want to inform you that I started with the work on the second edition of my german symfony book last week.  I got a lot of feedback (positive and negative) for the first edition of the book.The new edition will cover the symfony version 1.2 and will have a chapter about routing (a lot of people wished so) and enhanced chapters about Forms and Doctrine. All other chapters will slightly changed and adapted to version 1.2 of the framework.So help me to improve the next edition of the book. Send me an email with your suggestions.    Timo 

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With version 6.5 of Netbeans there is now full PHP support integrated in this popular IDE. On the roadmap for Version 7 is a planned symfony support. The Netbeans PHP project lead Petr Pisl is asking for ideas and feature requests on his blog for the upcoming Symfony support.

So take some minutes and leave him a comment what Symfony specific features you like to see in the next release

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Today I released a new version of my sfAmfPlugin for the symfony Framework. Main focus of this release was the support of Doctrine. Now you can transfer Doctrine_Recordset- and Doctrine_Collections directly without mapping the values. As you can see in the following listing there is nothing to do for you to use this feature.

class HelloWorld extends sfAmfService {

  public function sayHello($message) {

    $result = Doctrine::getTable('Menu')->findAll();

    return $result;

  }

}

So you can transfer your Doctrine classes directly to the Flex-Client.

You can find more information on the Plugin homepage.

I will keep on working on the plugin so stay tuned for upcoming changes

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As I wrote in my last blog article I on my way to develop my first Symfony application with a Flex fronten. Therefore I’m developing my own Symfony plugin to handle AMF-Service-Calls from the client. For my first steps I used the AMF-PHP library what worked great but has one really big drawback: It has a GPL-License. Cause I developing in a commercial environment GPL isn’t pretty useful for a library. After some googling around a found SabreAMF. SabreAMF is also written in PHP but is more a low level library. But it is fitting my needs so i used it for the first public available version of my Symfony plugin.

Continue Reading »

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For a new upcoming project i was looking for the best way to implement the user interface. Currently there are more alternatives to choose from than ever in the history of developing webbased applications. The following ones were the candidates with the best chances:

1.) AJAX-Pimped HTML interface
This would have been the easiest choice. But this solution laks of a lot of features needed for modern web applications.

2.) ExtJS
I used ExtJS (www.extjs.com) for some mid-sized projects in the last months. The quality of the library is impressive. Most of the widgets are high quality solutions. But there are some problems with ExtJS

•   The license change to GPL offended a lot of developers and is not the best choice for enterprise applications
•   Developing Javascript-Interfaces with ExtJS takes a lot of time and is somtimes error-prone

3.) qooxdoo
Qooxdoo (www.qooxdoo.org) is another JavaScript based Widget-System. Compared with ExtJS there are far less features. Development is driven by one of the largest european hosting provider. The upcoming version 0.8 looks promising but in my opinion this solution is not really ready for enterprise web applications at the moment. For example the Grid-Controll lacks a lot of features that makes the Grid of ExtJS so cool.

4.) Flex
I tried Flex some months ago (Version 2) and at that time I was impressed how easy the development was. The new Version is even better. After playing around with some smaller samples I made the decission to use Flex as a frontend. The productivity in creating the user interface is great so far. It is extensible and the development with Action-Script is pretty easy for everyone who is able to develop JavaScript. With the commercial Flex Builder the development is fast and easy.

I cross my fingers that it scales good for user interfaces of enterprise applications with many windows, masks and informations.

Symfony and Flex
Communication between flex an the backend can be done on different ways. For PHP backend AMF is the best way. Some month ago there was a AMF-Plugin for symfony but it isn’t in the plugin list anymore. So I decided to develop my own.

So far i have a first version (0.1) based on AMFPHP with basic features needed to create Services that are called in Symfony actions. Cause AMFPHP is GPL too i will replace it with another solution. Also Doctrine and Propel-Support is on my TODO-list.

So stay tuned, i will post more informations the next days.

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Today i got my author copies of my Symfony book. It is the first time I see it printed and I’m really happy with it. Thanks to all people of the entwickler.press publishing house!

I got the first feedback of readers and so far they are positive Thats good cause i was pretty nervous to here what all the reader will think about the book. After over a year of writing you get pretty unsure if the content will fit everybody.

Yesterday the new version 1.1 of symfony was released and so the book (that covers 1.1) and the new version were available nearly at the same day. Thats timing

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After a long, long time of writing and waiting my german symfony book is available. The book covers the new version 1.1 of symfony is is available in bookshops or online store like Amazon.

The content covers the basics of symfony, security, propel, doctrine the new form framework and many other things.

Please send me your feedback on how you like it. If you find anything thats wrong please tell me! All found errors and news arround the book can be found on the books webseite www.symfony-zone.com

Hope you will like it, cause i have wrote many hours/days/month on the content of the book

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today i launched the first “version” of the official website of the german Symfony-Book “Das Symfony Framework” that will be available in the next few days. The book covers version 1.1 of Symfony. On the website you can find informations about the book, the bugs that are found in the book and links for each chapter (still a lot of links to be added at the moment)

If you are interessted just visit the website under www.symfony-zone.com (german only)

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