Symfony - PHP Applications On Strong Foundation

2008-11-14T23:44:00.000-08:00

Surchur.com - How symfony leverage application upgrades

2008-07-13T04:49:00.000-07:00

Part 2.
In part 1. I explained why symfony was a good choice for the implementation of surchur.com
now I will try to expose the advantages of symfony while in upgrade mode.

The MVC separation gives huge advantages over spaghetti php code developement, so when the redesign was a mandatory issue the whole problem was to change the VIEW, this meant changing the html, css and images that were remade from scratch.

The templates change didn't required any changes over the other 2 segments (MODEL and CONTROLLER) , making the redesign more a HTML battle for crossbrowser capabilities fought on every known fronts: Safari, Firefox, IE7, Opera and mostly IE6.

By the way, for those of you who are still using IE6, please upgrade to IE7 or better change your browser(to firefox, safari or opera) and help the world(and the internet) being a better place, also you will contribute to the internet's evolution and our civilization.

The symfony tree directory structure makes easy to find templates you need to change or replace, giving you all the power over you html code.

People working on templates are usually web designers, who may not know symfony very well and may have difficulties finding template fragments, since they can be scattered all over the application. These few guidelines will make them more comfortable with the symfony template system.

myproject/
apps/
  application1/
    templates/       # Layouts for application 1
    modules/
      module1/
        templates/   # Templates and partials for module 1
      module2/
        templates/   # Templates and partials for module 2
      module3/
  templates/   # Templates and partials for module 3

The above structure is the default directory structure of every symfony application,
BUT this is not mandatory!
Symfony will allow you to change this structure and easily configure where the
templates and other resources are, it's a matter of choice and requirements, I personally
love the existing structure and planning to use it as much as possible as is.

The great feature of template fragments makes even easier to keep different parts of html
in the files you want, you can reuse code and be as flexible as you want, once again,
it's a matter of choice and imagination(but mostly architecture) how you organize your pieces of
code, the point here is that symfony allows you to play with the html in the way you want and
keeps you save by don't messing with the logic of the application.

There's more to tell about the way symfony made my life easy when developing surchur.com
but time is limited, so I will tell you this, if there's any reason why you(a developer) should
switch to symfony when developing php web application, then that would be the symfony community,
you'll get assistance, pluggins and snipets, everything what a php developer dream about!

Cheers, and happy symfony coding.

Symfony - PHP Applications On Strong Foundation: How to Build Enterprise Ready PHP Applications

2008-05-14T00:59:00.000-07:00

Symfony - PHP Applications On Strong Foundation: How to Build Enterprise Ready PHP Applications

Surchur.com - What's behind the blue ui

2008-05-08T09:00:00.001-07:00

PART 1.

...best topics to use Surchur.com for?

Surchur is a great source for the latest and the greatest on topics that are in the now. For example, want to learn the latest about your favorite pop star. Type their name into Surchur and you'll be amazed at all of the nitty gritty you'll find. Surchur.com isn't so good for that narrow, topical Surch that you might make on one of those big leviathan search engines. For example, type in "toby's cinnamon spice peach cobbler" into Surchur.com and we're pretty sure you'll be disappointed.

This description is for the users of our service/site called surchur.com, but for developers this post will offer some information beside the usual FAQ's from the site; I will try to cover some aspects of the PHP architecture, methodologies and are related informations about this cool application.

At the start of the project we didn't considered Symfony for the project because it was really simple in terms of specifications and features to offer, don't get me wrong, there were plenty of features and more to come in the future but the whole application development didn't cried for something big.

So far so good, but after some while additions of features required a lot of code changes at all levels(the model had to be modified, the user interface was in a continous change and it was predicted to be changed all the time, urls had to be friendly and action oriented, etc).
Basically there was too much changes to make every day because we weren't using something powerful enough to support easy code changes and on the fly specifications changes.

This was the turning point when we decided that Symfony is the answers to all our problems: - rapid development after setting up the right structure
- easy to change existing functionalities without compromising existing ones
- a community where we could find some real answers to real problems
- scalability
- extensibility, etc.

More clearly Symfony offered:
- clean URLs, a great feature that everybody likes (both humans and search engines)
- a flexible way to change our UI and add gradually more features
- multi level caching of pages/information and very flexible way to control the life time of cached pages
- a very structured and organized code
- seamless AJAX integration
- scalability for the future

Most of these features were enabled by default when the development started, so all I had to concentrate on was the implementation of the features and expand the current features.

The user interface was created to support a lot changes in the future and having in mind that we will need to be able to change stuff like color-schemes(CSS) and other visual elements(HTML).
The clear separation of code following the MVC pattern made possible the existence of separate layers with separate functionalities and the expansion of each without affecting the other layers.

Also the information sources(news sites, social network sites, blogs, etc) that are being offered were implemented in very dynamic way and using generic code, so the integration of new sources is seamless and very fast. This is very powerful because we can expand the site in a very smart way not having to make changes at other layers and functionalities, new implementations are very simple and I consider that is more a routine rather than programming.

The caching system uses all the possible features offered by Symfony... it's hard to mention and cover all of them, so I would rather suggest to follow this symfony tutorial about caching and read more right at the source; the bottom line is that we are very fast because symfony made this possible in a very smart way.

End of Part 1.

How to Build Enterprise Ready PHP Applications

2008-04-28T01:09:00.000-07:00

"How to Build Enterprise Ready PHP Applications" - a sentence which for most of the PHP programmers might be strange or inexistent, but can PHP sustain enterprise applications?

The answer is YES or NO, depending on how you(the developer) are familiar with good practices and concepts of software architecture design patterns.
Let me take you out from the dark:
the coding language is not really a mandatory issue when creating enterprise ready applications, but have to provide the basics for creating these solutions, so the only remaining issue is if you are able to create enterprise applications or if you have at least the knowledge about what an enterprise applications is?

PHP's original purpose was to create web sites, in an easy, fast and not very skilled way. From that point PHP has been the preferred coding language for most web developers, it offered all features for programmers that other languages didn't:
- fast learning curve: you could/can learn PHP basics in a week
- no special training or background required to start PHP
- very good and easy HTML integration
- great support from developer communities
- free of charge developer environment: Apache and MYSQL are free open sources backbones for any PHP application
- no special tools or IDE's required, you could use even notepad to create PHP code
and a lot of other features that made PHP so popular for novice and enthusiasts.

Also this was big step for companies which were involved in web development, direct producers or outsourcing companies, eventually for clients:
- low development costs: you could/can find a PHP programmer in India and build you a site for less than 100$
- low server hosting cost: you can/could find everywhere an Apache server to host your PHP application for less than 10$/moth
- fast development time: simple web site's can be built in less than a week
- a great community of cheap developers: if you don't like a developer you can switch to another very easy and no costs are implied

In economical terms PHP produced a great movement in the area of outsourcing and offshore; many US based or western EU companies turned their eyes to Asian or East European based firms which offered cheap and fast developed web sites.

So where's the new thing about all these, everybody knows this, you would say.
Everybody knows this, but time passed you know... today PHP developers are considered to be cheap and are disregarded as real programmers because of this image:
"PHP? anybody can be do it, so why pay more?"
The truth is that things are changing and PHP did changed a lot, so it's about you(the developer) and the customers to notice this and act as needed!

Starting from PHP 5 Zend(the php company) tried to change PHP to be a real programming language with all the capabilities that other languages had, mostly what Zend tried to do was to make PHP an enterprise ready language which is not limited for creating "web sites".

What happened next is simple, most of the developers remained with the old image and regarded PHP in the same, those remained the "cheap" developers that you still can find nowadays in India, Pakistan or any other emerging economy country.

BUT there was also a good portions of developers that expected this step and were finally able to:
- consider themselves real OOP(object oriented programming) developers
- apply REAL software design patterns
- follow development "good practices" specific to other languages like JAVA or .NET family
- create enterprise level frameworks
- create scalable applications which could sustain mid-range enterprise needs
- and finally but not least added value to the work they made

So if you(the developer) continue today to develop PHP applications for 100$ and have no interests to change this please go and read something else, also maybe you should quit your job and leave real programmers to do their job.

Starting from PHP 5, enterprise ready frameworks started to emerge, all of these frameworks followed good practices from JAVA, Ruby,Python and other existing frameworks and allowed web development firms to finally create scalable web applications with all the features that other mentioned language offered.
It's obvious what I'm going to say next: if you want to "Build Enterprise Ready PHP Applications" you MUST unconditionally use a framework which offers the features needed to create such applications.
If you have an existing framework created by yourself... drop it, it's not useful if you don't have support from other developers and you can't make it evolve... you are as good as a stick in the ocean, you will finally be lost.
If you didn't used a framework till now and I impressed you with this post(or not :)) then you should consider the Symfony framework http://www.symfony-project.org.
Now I won't say that this is the best PHP framework out there, but rather I would like to show and highlight, for everybody who is not familiar with Symfony, why should switch to this framework, so starting from this post(actually the upcoming ones) I will gradually start share my daily experience and show "the light" for those who want to see it... wow this is a biblical sentence :D

PS : sorry for my grammar faults or mistakes, english is not my native language.

Technorati Profile

Start my blog :)

2008-04-25T16:14:00.000-07:00

Hello world!
I just started my blog and I'm a little confused how to make the "go" but I'm pretty sure that I'll have a lot of experience to share.
Also I'm a man with lot of ideas, maybe sometimes I have too much ideas :) but this will be a good way to share some of my ideas related to PHP, Symfony, good practices in developing LAMP applications and much much more...
It's a bit late now, 2:20 AM :)) so I will go to bed and come back with some good stuff.
Good Night WEB!