Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
The Symfony project is known for providing high quality software. Since 2011 the Symfony2 framework has been a trusted base for creating web applications and the various components have been adopted by numerous popular Open Source projects like Laravel and phpBB.
The current world of computing owes a lot to Microsoft. They made a bold bet on the value of software over hardware over 30 years ago. The legacy of this carries on today with commodity hardware, but software itself has also largely become a commodity with Open Source.
Yet there is still something we could learn from IBM PC Compatible clones at this time of "decoupling" content management. The focus remains in breaking up Open Source products to pieces and then gluing those bits together with a specific type of REST glue.
Back in December 2014 I did some experimenting with the then unfinished version of the HTTP/2 protocol with the H2O web server. I managed to the the server up and running with the built in PHP server to serve some HTTP/2.
Since it's inception commerce on the internet has been a perfect fit. The technology allows both window shopping and an easy route to the actual purchase. eCommerce has been around for quite a while, and not just with durable goods - Pizza Hut made their first online sale as early as 1994.
Today is an exciting day for PHP developers as PHP 7.0.0 is unleashed and we've got some news on the future of Symfony.
Symfony 2.8 has just been released. It marks the end of the road for the Symfony 2.x series active development and further improvements will be done in the 3.x series from now on.
Version 2.8 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release and will be supported for bugfixes until November 2018 and security fixes until the same month of 2019.
PHP 7 was made available on December 3rd 2015. It offers great improvements in performance and memory use, which are even more significant in resource limited environments like the Raspberry Pi. Together with MySQL 5.7 and the lightweight H2O web server it offers significant gains to performance in LAMP applications.
I have been debating on the future of WordPress, but that is now all clear. The future of WordPress is all JavaScript. The first step in this is a new interface, Calypso, open sourced today by Automattic - the driving force behind WordPress development.
In the previous article I discussed eCommerce applications built with Symfony technologies and the obviously glaring omission is Drupal Commerce 2. In this version the eCommerce extension is rewritten to be compatible with Drupal 8 and will introduce modern PHP development conventions and Symfony and other PHP components to the product.
Symfony is a stable and proven platform for creating web applications of all kinds. The roadmap and support for LTS releases is exemplary. This is one of the key things companies should consider when building an online service for the long term. The credibility of an eCommerce merchant hinges on it's reliability.
I held a presentation on how shared code helps Content Management Systems focus on the essential. The specific case was focusing on Drupal 8 and Symfony. I first started creating the presentation with Shower, but decided to switch to a product I had never used before - Sway.
This is video of editing my presentation on Drupal 8, Symfony and Content Management with the skills I acquired while creating the presentation with Sway in a few hours total. In the spirit of lean, I produced no waste as I got a perfectly good web page about in the process.
HTTP/2 is here today and growing constantly. As PHP remains the the most common language for creating web sites and web applications with tools like WordPress and Drupal, it is integral that it keeps up to date with the latest web technologies.
Bolt CMS, eZ Platform and Drupal 8 are just a few content management tools using Symfony Components for a number of core functionalities. This is well known, but often a deeper insight into exact what pieces these various projects deem valuable for taking into use in the projects. Here are eight components that are popular among these tools.
The Drupal project announced way back in 2012 that they are adopting Symfony Components. At that stage the Symfony2 project was less than a year old. Today Symfony stands as one of the initiators of the contemporary PHP culture we have today, but the launch of Drupal in 2015 will push Symfony mainstream.
Magento is a popular Open Source eCommerce system written with PHP. The system originates to 2007 and as early as 2010 an announcement was made about a significant upgrade project. Now the project is finally at final stages and is set to be launched by end of year 2015. This coincides with the recent launch of the Magento Commerce company.
Forum software is a cornerstone of communications on the web. There are numerous of open forums around and also a lot more that are hidden form plain sight. Many of these are powered by PHP and are facing the same challenges as CMSes an ageing codebase. Flarum is a fresh option for forum applications.
For people working with web sites and web applications, there is never a lack of new things to learn. HTTP/2 is one of these things. It will be in a very significant role in both the lives of developers and users of all web services. Somewhat contrarily it won't change anything to the users of these. Or even the developers.
Symfony is a collection of software components. It's also a framework to tying these components together to provide a base for all kinds of applications. As a backend framework the Symfony Standard Edition does not come with a default UI, but there are a number of options to create these.