for non-techies
Ibuildings Presentation
Ibuildings
The PHP Professionals
www.ibuildings.nl
+31 118 429 550
info@ibuildings.nl
Ibuildings
Version 10

Contents of this presentation
• What is symfony?
• Symfony timeline
 History
 Present
 Future
• Technology for non-techies
 Buzzwords
 But is it that interesting?
 And what does it do?
Monday, December 10, 2007 2

What is symfony?
• PHP5 Web Application Framework
 Aims at bringing open source to the enterprise
 Wants to speed up development of web applications
 Wants to offer maintainability and structure
 Wants to offer professionalism
 Supports “agile” development
 Is easily extendable
 Provides standard web security options
 Not written from scratch, but based on existing open source
projects
 But ... it’s french ;)
Monday, December 10, 2007 3

Symfony timeline: History
• Symfony is relatively young
 2005 saw the first release
 2007: first stable release (1.0.0)
• Ideas floating in the head of Fabien Potencier
since 2003
• Since early releases, a community began to grow
Monday, December 10, 2007 4

Symfony timeline: Present
• Symfony version 1.0.9
• A lot of development for symfony 1.1
• 100’s of open source plugins
• Big community spread out over forums, Google
groups and local symfony portals
• An ever-growing list of applications build with
symfony
• An ever-growing list of companies using symfony
Monday, December 10, 2007 5

Symfony timeline: Future
• Coming soon: Symfony 1.1
 The first step towards a leaner, meaner 2.0
 Mainly optimization and a few new features
• 2008: Symfony 2.0
 Completely rewritten
 Less magic, clearer code
 Faaaaasssstttteeeerrrrr
• But...
 Symfony 1.0 will be supported with bugfixes and
security patches for a long time to come
 Upgrade path from symfony 1.0 to 1.1
Monday, December 10, 2007 6

Technology for non-techies
Monday, December 10, 2007 7

Buzzwords..eh..Buzz Acronyms
• AJAX
• RSS/ATOM
• RAD/XP
• DRY
• KISS
Monday, December 10, 2007 8

But is it that interesting?
• Very free license: MIT
 Do whatever you want with it
 Just leave the copyrights
• Stable
 Minor releases only contain bugfixes or very minor
additions
 Only major releases *may* break backwards
compatibility
 Monthly release schedule
• Based on best practices
• Aimed at the enterprise from the start
Monday, December 10, 2007 9

But is it that interesting?
• It wants to lower development cost
 Lower cost-per-line
• Easier testing
• Simpler maintainance
– Results in lower overall cost
 Less lines of code
• Configurable options
• Autoloading
• Automating standard tasks
– Results in less bugs
– Results in less code to write
– Results in lower overall cost
Monday, December 10, 2007 10

But is it that interesting?
• It wants to result in higher quality
PHP5

MVC and other “design patterns”

Object oriented

Documentation

Security

Unit and Functional testing

Agile approach

Monday, December 10, 2007 11

And what does it do?
• Complete application structure
 All applications have a similar structure
 Basic structure is created automatically
 A lot of configurable features, such as routing, display
options, security, caching, and much more
• Applications are split into modules
 For instance: news, projects, contact
 Basic module structure is created automatically
 Module-specific configuration as well as overruling
application-configuration
Monday, December 10, 2007 12

And what does it do?
Monday, December 10, 2007 13

And what does it do?
• Debugging help for developers
 Faster debugging and optimizing with debug toolbar
 Full flow can be tracked, making it easy to find out why
certain things happen in a page
Monday, December 10, 2007 14

And what does it do?
• Debugging continued...
 Same overlay for database queries and variables and
configuration settings
 Optimization overlay: check which parts of a page takes
longer
Monday, December 10, 2007 15

And what does it do?
• Database abstraction and
ORM using Propel/Creole
 Automation of model creation
 All data logic in models, models
expose the data to the
application
 Easily extendable without losing
custom code
• Easy templating
 No template engine; view should
not contain any complicated
logic anyway
 Global template for overall
layout
 Partials, components, slots for
sharing info between modules
Monday, December 10, 2007 16

And what does it do?
• Form validation
 No annoyingly long coding, checking all form fields
 A simple configuration file is enough for standard
validation
 Easily write custom validators
• Easy AJAX integration
 No need to write javascript anymore for most common
AJAX uses
 Everything in easy to use php functions that generate
and inject the javascript code
 Can support fallback for browsers that do not support
javascript
Monday, December 10, 2007 17

And what does it do?
• Routing and SEO
 “Friendly” URLs by default
 Can be made more friendly by the routing system
• Routing based on simple configuration file
• Routing system is based on Ruby on Rails routing
• /news/article/id/536 can be /news/536 with simple
configuration
• /news/article/id/536 can be
/news/this_is_some_great_news with a little extra logic
 Route changes in configuration will reflect links in the
application if the special url_for() and link_to() functions
are being used
Monday, December 10, 2007 18

And what does it do?
• Speed and performance
 Caching of configuration
 Caching of pages; even up to actually creating static
HTML pages
 Caching of components, slots and partials
 Caching of parts of your template
 Debug mode will show which parts are cached
• i18n and i10n
 Can be configured per application or module
 Can be changed dynamically (for instance when a user
logs in)
 Support of XML Localization Interchange File Format
(XLIFF) standard format
Monday, December 10, 2007 19

And what does it do?
• Generators
 Admin generator will generate a basic management
interface
• Uses database relations if defined
• Highly configurable without any coding
• Can easily get a custom layout
 Custom generators allow automating even more tasks
• You can easily write your own generator templates to
generate your own pieces of code
• Unit and functional testing
 Built in unit and functional testing framework
 Better code, easier testing
• Easy deployment
 Single command for deploying application
Monday, December 10, 2007 20

And what does it do?
• Highly extendable
 Use Zend Framework or ezComponents in symfony
without a hassle
 Use plugins to instantly add new functionality to your
application
 Write your own plugins to share your own functionality
across projects, or with the community
 One of the most important plugins: sfZendLucene
(integrating Zend Framework Lucene search with your
symfony application)
 Lots of other plugins: CMS, discussion forum, weblog,
Yahoo! UI, Urchin/Google Analytics integration, several
PDF generators, JPGraph, several payment processors
(Paypal, EchoPay, AuthorizeNet), sfGuard (full using
authentication), and many more
Monday, December 10, 2007 21

Questions?
?
Monday, December 10, 2007 22