Symfony Finland
Random things on PHP, Symfony and web development
Windows has always been somewhat of an oddball when it comes to PHP development. In the past years it has lost out on developer mindshare to UNIX-like Operating Systems like Linux and macOS.
With the release of Windows 10 Anniversary Update in August 2016 Microsoft now offers an interesting option for PHP development in the Windows environment: The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
Most projects created with the Symfony framework nowadays also include quite a bit of logic done on the client side. There is a large number of options on the market and this can lead to trouble choosing between the options. The JavaScript scene is full of camps and cutting through the buzz is quite a bit of work.
Late in 2015 the Symfony project as a whole celebrated it's tenth anniversary. Another significant milestone is reached in July 2016 as Symfony2, the second major iteration celebrates it's fifth anniversary. Five years is a long time in IT, but even more so in web development.
By text definition a workflow is a sequence of connected steps tied to objects of some sorts. In each step a set of validations and actions are be applied. Most web developers are familiar with these type of flows and have likely implemented a workflow in one form or another.
It's been said that there are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. It seems that this statement from Phil Karlton continues to be true. Naming things is as close as code can be to poetry, so I'll leave that for the philosophers to discuss.
Invalidating items from cache is much more clear-cut problem to define. The more efficient and easy the solution, the better. Symfony3 already has some improvements for that, with more coming in the near future.
The latest versions of PostgreSQL and MySQL support a JSON data type. While completely separate NoSQL stores like MongoDB and Redis can be very tempting, but using the JSON capabilities of your main RBDMS in environments in a hybrid mode might be a good choice.