Symfony-Zone

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.

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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 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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Sad news for all Symfony developers: François Zaninotto is leaving the symfony core team, cause of different opinions about the philosophie of writing code that cames with the new version 1.1. François was the documentation lead and active contributor of plugins of the symfony project. His work is one of the main reasons that I started developing with the Symfony-Framework: The great documentation and tutorials.

Hopefully François will not stop to work on the plugins he wrote, cause there are a lot of them that are used by many developers in different projects.

The reason why he leaves

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i have just done another two-day Symfony-Training in Dresden (Germany). As always everyone was pretty impressed how mighty Symfony is and how much time can be saved using a framework like symfony compared to regular PHP-development. In the training we used the beta of the version 1.1 with great success.

If you are interessted in a inhouse symfony training in europe don’t hesitate to contact me (timo.haberkern@shift-up.de) or take a look at my(german) website for a more detailed description of the trainings (PHP and ExtJS too): Training-Website

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Using Windows and Eclipse is sometimes a pain if you develop symfony applications. Switching from Eclipse to console and back for simple tasks like clearing cache, adding new modules and so on. And even when in the console you must realize that the windows console sucks. I allways wish me back home to my MAC or Linux machine if I develop on work (windows).

But there is light at the end of the tunnel. There are four plugins that every eclipse developer needs if implementing symfony projects with eclipse:

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The last week I coded a webbased application thats being used directly from CD-ROM. I used Server2Go as a CD-ROM Webserver that servers the application for browsing and searching on the CD-ROM.As you know my favorite Webframework is Symfony (www.symfony-project.com) so i developed this piece of software with the most current stable symfony version (1.0.9).

There are only some things that needs your attention if you want to make a symfony application runnable from CD-ROM:

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