http://symfony-reloaded.org/, a quick run down on the latest version of Symfony.

It’s looking really good, especially exciting is the promise of massive performance advantages (3 times faster than Zend!).

After a few enquiries, we are looking into the possibility of setting up a Symfony training course based in Leeds in the UK.

At present this is not a firm plan but we are definitely looking into it and would really like some feedback on what kind of Symfony Training course you would like to see.

The course would likely be an introduction to the Symfony PHP framework, possibly going through the Jobeet sample site documentation which represents an excellent training framework.

At this stage it is not totally clear what we would need to include in the course, especially if we can expect candidates to already be familiar and confident with object oriented PHP. One option is that we do another course which is purely focussed on the object oriented aspects of PHP, like a crash course of OO PHP for coders who have no or little experience of this style of coding.

If you are interested and would like to share with us your ideas and expectations for a UK Symfony course please do get in touch. We will take your ideas on board and keep your info on file so we can let you know as and when the course goes live.

My favourite PHP framework of the moment, Symfony, is now moving to my favourite version control system – Git.

read more about it Symfony 2 Migration to Git

Its only for the version 2 release, but its a nice step forwards. Github is a really nice system.

The blog post also mentions this great online Git book:

Pro Git

Not actually come across that before, will be handy.

If you are looking for a freelance PHP developer or company to help you create or maintain your Symfony based PHP application then you have come to the right place. Edmonds Commerce specialise exclusively in PHP web development and are able to assist you with all kinds of Symfony requirements from editing or extending existing sites through to creating new Symfony based web sites.

Symfony is an excellent choice as a PHP framework for building secure, scalable web sites to meet all kinds of different requirements. Utilising best practices, design patterns and the latest Object Oriented features of PHP 5, Symfony is a delight to work with and enables us to deliver high quality web applications in a fraction of the time required for a fully bespoke development.

So to conclude – if you are looking for a UK based Symfony Developer, or any kind of PHP developer then get in touch today.

Continuing to play around with Symfony I am impressed with what I am seeing. It definitely has a feeling of “best practices” that seems to pervade the whole framework. It feels like without any effort you are going to be working in a secure way. It also seems to do a hell of a lot for you automatically.

As it relies heavily on command line scripts, there is even room for further automation by creating my own custom scripts to chain together symfony commands. In fact I’m starting to feel like I wont need to do any PHP coding at all any more, just figure out the data model and run a custom shell script, and then issue the invoice!

Of course its not going to be that easy. For one thing, creating YAML files is still taking some getting used to. And deciphering errors on the command line is also taking some getting used to, even though they are probably the same old error messages. One thing that tripped me up was a typo in one of my YAML files that sent Propel looking for a non existant class when running the data-load command. That’s one of those “gotchas” that is bound to happen, but being so green it stumped me for a few minutes until I spotted the errant extra ‘l’ in one part of the YAML.

I now have some nice generated class structures with data models, and Netbeans’s autocomplete is making life even easier for me, suggesting object property getters as I type so I don’t even need to refer back to the schema to double check column names, cool.

Another thing I have noticed is the use of good old fashioned procedural style functions. This is good, because PHP lets you do this and why should you have to have absolutely everything inside a class when all you need is a little function that you can use here and there. Namely the template system uses functions like

<?php include_metas()?> and <?php echo url_for('module/action')?>

. I like this. I’m not a Java developer, I’m a PHP developer, so we can do this kind of thing .

I’ve been meaning to play with Symfony for ages. I have played with Zend Framework and have also created my own light weight framework (which I will probably continue to use for light weight / rapid development projects or where I am working with a designer and need to keep the complexity to an absolute minimum). So I Checked Symfony 1.2 out of SVN and started with the quickstart guide and using the Jobeet tutorials as a reference.

The first thing that is weird for me is creating my DB schema in YML files. Thankfully Netbeans seems to be helping me out by handling YML properly, syntax highlighting etc. Another great thing that I have found are these awesome cheatsheets, especially the DB schema cheatsheet which tells me pretty much everything I need to know in once nice colour coded page

In future I would like to use MySQL workbench and the Symfony YAML MySQL Workbench exporter plugin to make this process more streamlined, but for now I am going to try to get my head around the native YAML syntax. I always believe in learning to do things in a text editor first and then looking to to automate once I have at least a basic understanding.