Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
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.
The Drupal 8 development team is doing great improvements to the product regarding HTTP caching. With validation tags, contexts and so on it feels familiar to people working with Symfony2 framework and the FOSHttpCacheBundle.
Another interesting addition is an adaptation of Facebook's BigPipe rendering strategy, which downloads HTML snippets in parallel for improved load times. Symfony2 as a HMVC framework can load bits asynchronously, but there is room to improve.
Blackfire is a product that helps developers profile their applications. It is a combination of various tools. It is similar to, Xdebug a PHP extension which provides debugging and profiling capabilities, but the major difference being that you can run it in production without significant overhead.
The word legacy in the IT word almost exclusively negative connotations. Out of that context it is used more diversely. Consider the legacy left by individuals and organisations such Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Michael Jackson and the Greek and Roman Empires. The forementioned empires shed a lot of blood and caused misery, but they continue to live in our everyday lives after thousands of years. That is the power of legacy.
You can have good and bad legacy in IT as well. You could say that Windows ME was built on bad legacy where as Mac OS X was started on good legacy. But all of these have history behind them, just as the code you write today will have in the future. Most of your code is likely disposable, but it's still worth considering the legacy you leave.
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.