Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
A brief introduction to three contemporary topics in the PHP world:
There is plenty of buzz around the web development community about web components. There are standards polyfill implementations and custom approaches such as Facebook's React and Flux combo. While there is no shortage of options, this post will introduce yet another one useful family of technologies.
The popularity of Symfony has made the debug toolbar a familiar sight for many developers. Ranging from Drupal to Bolt to eZ Publish, many different tools now share common debugging interfaces.
Symfony is a term related to software development with the PHP language. Symfony is a set of components and an HMVC (Hierarchical Model View Controller) framework to be used in PHP programming. It released under the MIT license as Open Source.
Over ten years ago there was big hype around outsourcing. It seemed like all the things that could be done half way around the world for a fraction of the cost would be. I did think of this and even bought and read an excellent book, My Job Went To India (And All I Got Was This Lousy Book), from Chad Fowler.
As a web developer I did feel quite comfortable that the industry was too dynamic, quickly changing and "unspeccable" to be outsourced efficiently. In hindsight I was right, web development is still mostly done close to the client and it's still always chaos just hours before launch.
As silly as it sounds, there is even a rise of a Cult of Programming Artisans; supposedly hand crafting fine code and always searching for the elegant solution. Goddam hipsters.
But me? I don't feel as comfortable now as I did a decade ago.
The Symfony Full Stack framework is a fully featured platform for you to create your custom applications on top of. If you have experience with it, the structure logical and straightforward.
But as always, nobody is born an expert. The Symfony Community offers good tools to getting started with it. Here is one approach that could get you on the right path.
WordPress is like the bumble bee. Computer Scientists that studied the core code have concluded it is a miracle it works at all. It's clearly a product that taught the original developers how to work with PHP and MySQL. And it shows.
Over the years, cheeky kludge functions and inside jokes have been left in place as Poetry™. The core team stubbornly refuses to keep up with the times and adopt modern PHP development standards.
Superb skills in WordPress are like a country only exporting bananas. It gets you nowhere in the long run. So do you self a favour and save yourself from WordPress!
The PHP community has been buzzing about all the significant releases such as PHP 7, Symfony 3 and Drupal 8 in 2015. With improved userland application frameworks, better performance and lower memory usage PHP is about to be better than ever.
Yet the world is changing and maybe PHP shouldn't (or can't) even try to keep up with the Joneses.
Software bugs are familiar to both the developers and users of software. In his book, the Science of Debugging, Matthew A. Telles offers the following definition for a bug: “Bugs are behaviours of the system that the development team (developers, testers and project managers) and customers have agreed are undesirable.”
Due to human errors and bad specifications, bugs will continue to be a part of software development projects. Despite improved tooling and the introduction of Agile methodologies.
Benjamin Eberlei from Tideways has written an excellent series of articles on performance with bits and pieces that PHP and Symfony developers come into contact often.
Search Engines are a very significant factor in many businesses today. Many companies will fail or succeed depending on their ranking on Bing, DuckDuckGo or Google. This has understandably created a whole industry of Search Engine Optimisation around it. Money talks.
But it's worth noting that SEO, like programming, isn't a tangible good that you can own - it's free as in experience. You can get far in SEO with common sense and understanding that the nature of hypertext.
Your content needs to be good, trusted and accessible.
I wrote an article on using CloudFlare to manage traffic peaks. A commenter on Reddit wished for some statistics. I cannot retrospectively get any response comparison times or anything that would be a truly meaningful benchmark.
Heavyweight corporate IT giants such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are making significant investments in Node.js and JavaScript. It's becoming the latest technology in something often though of as black magic: Enterprise Integrations
Every once in a while you're lucky and end up with a positive problem - your website content is suddenly very popular. You might scramble and start turning up your servers and tuning up your caches or maybe someone's de-facto solution is to install HHVM to run your WordPress faster.
While this is all worth while if you plan for this to happen in the future as well, for and occasional hit piece of content it might not be worth it.
You can transfer content automatically from WordPress to Drupal to eZ Publish (nowadays eZ Platform). To help you get started with your automatic content migrations from WordPress to eZ Platform or Drupal, you'll want to hire skilled partners to do this for you.
eZ Publish Summer Camp and PHP Summer Camp are a joint event held in Croatia at the end of August (26. - 29.8.2015). There will be excellent professionals (and me) holding hands-on workshops about all things PHP, eCommerce, Content Management and whatnot.
If you're working in the PHP content management space (a fancy way of saying building websites with WordPress, Drupal, etc.) you've likely heard about Symfony. While it is just one part of a larger renaissance in the PHP community, it's probably the best known brand known to developers and business folk alike.
Using Symfony as a concept, however is quite ambiguous. Let's take a look at how three different content management tools have done just this.
The PHP core team have set themselves a deadline. They've publicly stated PHP 7 will be launched in October. While this does not feel like a remarkable thing, it still pushes the work forward like any other deadline out there.
Yeah, so... there's a new project coming to a trendy agency or a web tech sweatshop. Sales scramble and techies go bonkers on what to build it with - should we go for a CMS or a Framework?
Previously I wrote about Web Components standards and polyfills and how they'll finally bring us closer to a web build with reusable and isolated components. Rather than use those I thought I'd go ahead and create a web component with an alternative technology: Riot.js