All posts in Symfony2

Write Code for Humans

By On September 28, 2011 In Application Development, Interface Development, Symfony2, Zend Framework With No Comments Permanent Link to Write Code for HumansPermalink

After working on high-performance projects for a while (or aspiring to), it gets easy to build things in such a way that favors performance over readability. It’s good to be reminded every once and a while that while we develop code for computers to execute, ultimately it’ll be humans who will work with them.

Mobile web applications are an interesting example. A large portion of the code is downloaded and executed by remote clients, so we tend to pay more attention to total file-size, number of HTTP requests, and ultimately how much code gets executed on the other end. If we are graded on our work, surely this is what will be looked at. There are benchmarking tools such as Yahoo YSlow and Google Page Speed which help you analyze your site and suggest techniques to apply. Naturally, everyone wants an A or a high rating.

About a week ago, I was looking over one of my projects, and wondered what the hell happened to the code; it was awful. White-space was missing in a lot of areas, CSS was condensed (in most places), and even some of the PHP caching code was pretty hackish. Since I was having to rebuild a large component of the project for other reasons, I made an effort to clean up these concerning areas.

If you can optimize your architecture or design as you go, then by all means do it. What you shouldn’t do; however, is try and remove things that affect readability in favor of performance. I think there are two acceptable ways to do this… as part of a build/deployment script, or as a filter in production. Your development copy should always be for humans. Developer time is often significantly more expensive than server resources. Let’s look at some of the various resources we need to deal with… Continue Reading →

Using Zend_Db With Silex

By On July 15, 2011 In Symfony2, Zend Framework With 2 Comments Permanent Link to Using Zend_Db With SilexPermalink

I’ve been messing around with Silex (and of course Symfony2) a lot lately, and I was excited to see a Doctrine extension. However, it was only for the DBAL and not the ORM. In my symfony2 apps, I’ve finally adjusted to using Doctrine’s ORM, but for some reason, I’ve really grown to like the DBAL that Zend_Db offers over the pseudo SQL (DQL) that Doctrine has. Here is a quick Extension to get you started with Zend_Db.

<?php
 
namespace SyndExtension;
 
use SilexApplication;
use SilexExtensionInterface;
 
class ZendDb implements ExtensionInterface
{
    public function register(Application $app)
    {
        $app['autoloader']->registerPrefix('Zend_', $app['zend.class_path']);
 
        $app['db'] = $app->share(function() use ($app) {
            return Zend_Db::factory($app['db.adapter'], array(
                'host'     => $app['db.host'],
                'dbname'   => $app['db.dbname'],
                'username' => $app['db.username'],
                'password' => $app['db.password']
            ));
        });
    }
}

Create that under ./src/Synd/Extension/ZendDb.php. To use it, you’ll need to add Synd to your autoloader, and then register the extension in your application:

$app['autoloader']->registerNamespace('Synd', 'src');
 
$app->register(new SyndExtensionZendDb(), array(
    'db.adapter'      => 'mysqli',    
    'db.dbname'       => 'your_db',
    'db.host'         => 'localhost',
    'db.username'     => 'root',
    'db.password'     => '',
    'zend.class_path' => '/path/to/zf/library'
));

Please note that this is a quick and dirty bridge, and is for ZF1 not ZF2. If I’m breaking any best practices with naming and combining libraries, be sure to let me know. I’m hoping to explore the Zend_Db and Zend_Form combination since I use them heavily in my apps. This provides a very lightweight infrastructure in order to throw up quick proof of concept applications.

Hopefully this helps someone… or at least gives enough familiarity for my ZF buddies to start looking at Silex / Symfony2. ;)