Symfony-Zone » Symfony

First Sourcecode of TimeHive online

Timo Haberkern — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 09:09:02 +0000

I have been workign on a new open source project in the my sparetime of the last few weeks. TimeHive is a project timetracking solution written in Symfony. The sourcecode can be found at GitHub . At the moment there is no dedicated webpage for TimeHive, but I will setup one in the next few days. The installation has to be done manually at the moment (See README file).

Here are some teaser screenshots

Take a look at it. I appreciate every feedback (bug, patches, ideas…)

Timo

The best Symfony IDE: PHPEdit

Timo Haberkern — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 11:00:33 +0000

If you think about the best IDE you will probably think about eclipse with the PDT-Plugin, Netbeans or Kommodo. None of them has special support for the Symfony-Framework. As I wrote in an earlier post I’m using eclipse for my daily work. With some enhancements it is a pretty good IDE for Symfony-Development. Netbeans catched up with the last releases an there is a special Symfony-Support planned in one of the future releases.

Last week there was a new release of the Windows-PHP-IDE PHPEdit. Since Version 3.2 there is an excellent Symfony support in this IDE. A bunch of features makes the development with Symfony a lot more productive. I couldn’t resist and took a deeper look at this software. It was the first time that I used PHPEdit an I’m surprised on how good it is.

Wizards

PHPEdit has a lot of wizards for creating Symfony-Projects and different Symfony artifacts (i.e. modules, actions…). For developers who dont know all of the symfony command line tasks and all of their parameters, these wizards are a great help.

Commands

PHPEdit installs a plugin that allows the IDE to get information about all tasks of the current project. The context menu of the project is file-sensitive. So you will get other tasks in the context menu when clicking on a application than clicking on a module or project. All Symfony tasks are available via context menu. Most of them with an upcoming wizard in which you can set the parameters by mouse clicks

Code Completion and Editor

The Editor has everything you can think of and support for all neccessary file formats (i.e. YAML) are included. Code-Folding,Line-Numbers, Smart Idention and others are available. Plus you have a great IntelliSense support. The Editor knows even the Symfony-Framework functions of the classes. You can jump between Actions and View-Template what is solving one of the most annoying problems if you are working on a large project and have a lot of action.class.php files open.

Conclusion

The makers of PHPEdit did a wunderful job. The symfony support is how I it should be in every IDE

Beside of this Framework-Specific features there is all you need for PHP-Development. A good PHP-Editor with IntelliSense and PHP-Debugging, Project management, everything is on board and pretty good. The only drawback is that PHPEdit is not freely available. It has a commercial license starting with 89.- Euros for the basic feature edition. If you are not using windows another drawback is that PHPEdit is only available for windows.

I’m still surprised why I never used this IDE before because it has everything you need for PHP development. Maybe it was because of its commercial license. For now it is the best Symfony IDE. The Framework-Support is outstanding. Lets see how the planned Symfony-Support in Netbeans can compete with this.

Symfony applications on CD-ROM

Timo Haberkern — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:37:18 +0000

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:

1.) Freeze it: After developing you have to freeze your project with:symfony freeze app-name

2.) Now copy the entire (freezed) project folder to the htdocs folder of your Server2Go directory

3.) Clear the cache folder! You can do this by manually delete the content of this folder or by using “symfony cc” before copying the data to the htdocs folder

4.) Open the server/config_tpl/httpd.conf file and change the root directory of the server to the web folder in htdocs:

DocumentRoot “%CDPMS:DOCROOT%/web”

…

So far so good. Now the tricky part begins. Symfony is caching a lot of files and data in order to provide the best possible performance. Therefor views, configfiles and so on will be cached. Where’s the problem? The problem ist that the cache folder on CD-ROM isn’t writable and symfony is throwing exceptions if it can’t write the cache data…

My first thought: No problem, you have just to deactivate the caching in the settings.yml via

cache: off

Works great for view data, but not for the cached config data. Symfony always caches the config, there is no way to deactivate this (or i didn’t find one). So what to do? Was symfony the wrong choice for a cd-rom webapplication? No of course not

There possibility to customize the project structure (foldernames and hierarchie) via the constants.php file. You will find this in the htdocs/data/symfony/config folder. Open it and look for the line that starts with ‘sf_cache_dir’ and change it to:

‘sf_cache_dir’ => $sf_cache_dir = $_ENV['S2G_TEMP_FOLDER'].DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR. “cache”. DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR. $sf_environment,

Thats it! This line redirects the cache folder to a temorary folder on the users machine (is done by the S2G_TEMP_FOLDER environment variable that is set by Server2Go.

After that you can burn the Server2Go folder to a CD-ROM and everything works as expected