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Symfony2 goes live
Posted by
James Leckie on the 13th of August, 2011
Posted in News, Web Development | 1 Comment ›
At Alaress we have been using Symfony to develop our large scale applications for over 6 months now. We recently released Hotels.com.au based on the 1.4 framework. On July the 25th we were excited to note that Symfony 2.0 was released. This milestone is an important evolution in Symfony. We are particular excited by the introduction of Doctrine2 and Twig as primary functions.
Doctrine2 allows us to have a full blown ORM, treating all our database rows as full OO objects with complete hydration and lazy loading built in. In the past doctrine added massive overhead to projects reducing speed and scalability making it a tough decision to utilise. The latest version of Doctrine2 has stripped down the code, removed the magic and focused on speed. This coupled with native support in Symfony has made the decision to utilise the ORM much easier.
Twig has been on Alaress’ radar for a while, however for some time now we have been supporting the simple but powerful PHPLIB Template engine. It provided the separation of display from code but was limited in that blocks and data mapping was still done by hand. Twig provides us with the ability to map our Doctrine objects directly to the front-end developer who can then iterate, filter and conditional over the data objects. Giving the power back to the front-end developer to control how the data is presented.
Following the announcement we noticed that the old plugin framework did not support Symfony2. In Symfony2 plugins have been renamed to bundles. After a bit of hunting we found the following site that hosts links to all the symfony2 bundles. It also seems that github is the new centre of the Symfony2 universe so a quick search on github will bring up lots of results.
We have reviewed some of these bundles and here are our favourite so far. We look forward to working with these bundles in projects shortly.
Assetic
css/javascript/image precompiler/filter with twig integration
Imagine
image handling, resize/draw/filter
Sonata
admin builder
DoctrineExtensions
trees, sluggable (now with tree and m-1 support) and timestamps
FOSSUserBundle
user auth, email validation, password reset
PagerBundle
pagination
Google
anayltics, maps, adwords
Alaress is always looking to hire talented Symfony developers so if you have the skills please contact us.
on the 8th of November, 2011 4:42 pm
Giving the power back to the front-end developer to control how the data is presented.