Notes from DrupalCon - Drupal 8 meets Symfony2

The following are my notes from Drupal 8 meets Symfony2 on Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 at DrupalCon Denver. The slides can be found at http://speakerdeck.com/u/fabpot/p/symfony2-meets-drupal-8

Symfony is...

• A reusable set of standalone, decoupled, and cohesive PHP components that solve common web development problems
• Best practices
• Borrows ideas from other frameworks and languages
• Flexible and extenible
• an Object-Oriented set of classes
• compatible with PHP 5.3 and later
• a full-stack web framework
  • Drupal is using some
• http://symfony.com
  • http://symfony.com/components
• https://github.com/symfony/symfony
  • https://github.com/symfony/XXXX
• irc.freenode.net/symfony

Which Open-Source projects are already using the Symfony Components?

Projects

• Behat - a BDD framework
• Doctrine - an Object Relational Mapper and Database Abstraction Layer
• Propel - an object relational mapper
• PHPUnit - a PHP unit testing framework
• Jackalope - a content repository

Frameworks

• Silex - a micro-framework
• PPI 2 - a framework

Products

• easybook - a book publishing platform
• Midgard CMS - a content management framework
• Zikula - an application framework
• phpBB - a bulletin board software

What about Drupal 8?

• ClassLoader
• HttpFoundation
  • HttpKernel
  • Routing
• EventDispatcher
  • DependencyInjection

Using the Symfony Components

• Acquiring:
  • Git
  • Archves
  • PEAR
  • Composer
• Symfony Components comes with Drupal 8

ClassLoader

• Loads classes on demand, only when needed
• Built to autload any PHP Class if it follows standard conventions
  • http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/class_loader.html

HttpFoundation

• Symfony leverages open standards, including HTTP (RFC 2616)
  • http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2616.txt
• http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/http_foundation.html
• Defines a feature-full object-oriented layer for the HTTP Messages
• Replaces PHP native global variables and functions to allow writing better, more secure, and more testible code

Routing

• http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/routing.html

EventDispatcher

Similar to drupal hook system; biggest difference is that it’s OO.

HttpKernel

Implements dynamic part of HTTP specification.

HTTP Caching

• Symfony provides no caching layer for web pages; relies on HTTP cache headers
• Expiration
  • Cache-Control
  • Expires
• Validation
  • Last-Modified
  • If-Modified-Since
  • Etag
  • If-None-Match
• Expiration wins over Validation
  • Cache the page for a short period of time, 10 seconds for example, and every 10 seconds the page is validated
• Using the default HttpKernel allows Drupal to Benefit