eZPublish meets Symfony
Gaetano Giunta | phpDay 2013 | 17.5.2013

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Not your grandpa’s CMS

This is not eZ Publish
ANYMORE
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Not your grandpa’s CMS

The drivers

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Why change?
The need to refactor

 Existing codebase is 10 years old 
 High maintenance cost
 Started with no unit tests - singletons everywhere
 Layers and roles not properly defined / documented - interdependencies
 OOP before php had
 Private/protected/static
 Closures
 Namespaces
 Late static binding
 And much more
 Not built for an AJAX and REST world
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Why change?
Everyone loves NEW!

 Existing codebase is 10 years old 
 Widely deployed
 Well debugged
 Pitfalls have mostly been uncovered by now
 Proven to scale
 Well known:
 Documentation improved over years
 Tutorials, forums, blogs, aggregators
 Active community of practitioners
 Official training courses
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Why change?
Do not forget drawbacks

 Focus on our core business
 Experience Management
 Content Management
 NOT Framework maintenance
 Durable Architecture
 API stability
 Battle tested / not (only) the latest trend
 Scalability
 Lively Community!
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Picking a framework for a platform rebuild

• Simple Integration with existing API
• HMVC (Hierarchical Model View Controller) stack
• Decoupled Components
• Dependency Injection
• Good Template Engine
• Extensible, Open, Reliable ;-)
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Prerequisites

• Homebrew
• Zeta Components
• Zend Framework 2
• Symfony 2
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Candidates

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And the winner is…
Title of presentation is a hint, really...

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And the winner is…

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This is eZ Publish 5!
Standard
Symfony2 App.
(=app)
+eZ Publish
bundles
(PHP & REST APIs
+ Legacy)
vendor/
ezsystems/
ezpublish-kernel
+ Full-blown
Back-office

The challenge

Product Management SCRUM Story:
«As an existing user, I don’t want to be pissed off by a new
#@!$% version!»
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Backwards compatibility
(life sucks)

Product Management SCRUM Story:
«As an existing user, I don’t want to be pissed off by a new
#@!$% version!»
• 100% Data Compatible (same DB scheme)
• Possibility to include legacy templates in the new ones
• Routing fallback
• Load legacy content templates with legacy rules
• Settings
• Access Symfony services from legacy modules
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Backwards compatibility: the objectives

Product Management SCRUM Story:
«As an existing user, I don’t want to be pissed off by a new
#@!$% version!»
• 100% Data Compatible (same DB scheme)
• Possibility to include legacy templates in the new ones
• Routing fallback
• Load legacy content templates with legacy rules
• Settings
• Access Symfony services from legacy modules
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Backwards compatibility: the objectives

A new architecture

Product Management SCRUM Story:
«As an existing user, I don’t want to be pissed off by a new
#@!$% version!»
• 100% Data Compatible (same DB scheme)
• Possibility to include legacy templates in the new ones
• Routing fallback
• Load legacy content templates with legacy rules
• Settings
• Access Symfony services from legacy modules
Challenge Accepted
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BC: the challenge

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Dual-core architecture
Where the magic is

Legacy version still works perfectly standalone
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BC: icing on the cake

Taming the beast

 New Core: a standard Simfony app
 Legacy stack isolated in a dedicated
directory
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Refactoring: directory layout

use SymfonyComponentHttpFoundationRequest;
require_once __DIR__ . '/../ezpublish/autoload.php'; // set up class autoloading
require_once __DIR__ . '/../ezpublish/EzPublishKernel.php';
$kernel = new EzPublishKernel( 'dev', true ); // extends the Sf Kernel class
$kernel->loadClassCache(); // a method from parent class
$request = Request::createFromGlobals();
$response = $kernel->handle( $request );
$response->send();
$kernel->terminate( $request, $response );
 The Kernel class wraps the HTTPKernel
 It adds a Service Container
 It allows to register bundles via registerBundles()
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The new frontend controller
Using Symfony HTTP Kernel

 Sandbox legacy code in a closure
 Index.php had to be refactored (from 1100 lines to 20)
 Logic moved to a php class
 Separated environment setup from execution and teardown
 runCallback() sets up the global legacy environment
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Refactoring: bridging Legacy code

The ChainRouter from the Sf CMF project is used
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Routing: seamless integration

 eZ4 had an incomplete REST API
 Only functionality available: reading content
 Based on Zeta Components MVC component
 A new API has been implemented
 Full reading and writing of content is possible
 All “dictionary” data is also available
 Content-type for response can be JSON or XML (with an XSD!)
 Fully restful
 Usage of all HTTP verbs (and then some: PATCH)
 Respect http headers of request (eg: “Accept”)
 HATEOAS: use urls as resource ids
 No separate request handling framework needed: pure Symfony routing
 Bonus points: a client for the REST API, implements the same interfaces exposed
by the local PHP API – network transparency!!!
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REST API

An ongoing story

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Version 5.1 is around the corner

Where to go from here

There’s a few tickets left!
Did I tell you it’s on the sea?
Want to dive in?
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 Sf2 book – jolly good looking docs:
http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/index.html
 eZ Publish:
 Community: http://share.ez.no
 Source code: https://github.com/ezsystems
 API docs: http://pubsvn.ez.no/preview.html
 Slides soon on Slideshare
 Contact me: @gggeek, gaetano.giunta@ez.no
THANK YOU
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The usual suspects

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And now for something completely different