Thoughts filed in: Symfony2

Symfony2: as good as PHP gets?

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I've been getting my hands dirty with Symfony2 of late. At the start of the year, I was introduced to it when I built an app using Silex (a Symfony2 distribution). The special feature of my app was that it allows integration between Silex and Drupal 7.

More recently, I finished another project, which I decided to implement using Symfony2 Standard Edition. Similar to my earlier project, it had the business requirement that it needed tight integration with a Drupal site; so, for this new project, I decided to write a Symfony2 Drupal integration bundle.

Overall, I'm quite impressed with Symfony2 (in its various flavours), and I enjoy coding in it. I've been struggling to enjoy coding in Drupal (and PHP in general) – the environment that I know best – for quite some time. That's why I've been increasingly turning to Django (and other Python frameworks, e.g. Flask), for my dev projects. Symfony2 is a very welcome breath of fresh air in the PHP world.

However, I can't help but think: is Symfony2 "as good as PHP gets"? By that, I mean: Symfony2 appears to have borrowed many of the best practices that have evolved in the non-PHP world, and to have implemented them about as well as they physically can be implemented in PHP (indeed, the same could be said of PHP itself of late). But, PHP being so inferior to most of its competitors in so many ways, PHP implementations are also doomed to being inferior to their alternatives.

Configuring Silex (Symfony2) and Monolog to email errors

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There's a pretty good documentation page on how to configure Monolog to email errors in Symfony2. This, and all other documentation that I could find on the subject, works great if: (a) you're using the Symfony2 Standard Edition; and (b) you want to send emails with Swift Mailer. However, I couldn't find anything for my use case, in which: (a) I'm using Silex; and (b) I want to send mail with PHP's native mail handler (Swift Mailer is overkill for me).

Turns out that, after a bit of digging and poking around, it's not so hard to cobble together a solution that meets this use case. I'm sharing it here, in case anyone else finds themselves with similar needs in the future.

Rendering a Silex (Symfony2) app via Drupal 7

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There's been a lot of talk recently regarding the integration of the Symfony2 components, as a fundamental part of Drupal 8's core system. I won't rabble on repeating the many things that have already been said elsewhere; however, to quote the great Bogeyman himself, let me just say that "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship".

On a project I'm currently working on, I decided to try out something of a related flavour. I built a stand-alone app in Silex (a sort of Symfony2 distribution); but, per the project's requirements, I also managed to heavily integrate the app with an existing Drupal 7 site. The app does almost everything on its own, except that: it passes its output to drupal_render_page() before returning the request; and it checks that a Drupal user is currently logged-in and has a certain Drupal user role, for pages where authorisation is required.

The result is: an app that has its own custom database, its own routes, its own forms, its own business logic, and its own templates; but that gets rendered via the Drupal theming system, and that relies on Drupal data for authentication and authorisation. What's more, the implementation is quite clean (minimal hackery involved) – only a small amount of code is needed for the integration, and then (for the most part) Drupal and Silex leave each other alone to get on with their respective jobs. Now, let me show you how it's done.