A symfony feature that has been really helpful while working on projects with it is the debugging capabilities of the framework. Almost every day I see my self going to the command line an doing a tail -f log/frontend_dev.log in my symfony project. This helps me see what is going on behind the scenes, spot bugs, find places where I can improve the code, etc. If something goes wrong there is always a developer on the team that shouts “check the symfony logs”, showing that they had became an essential tool for development.
But not everything shines under the sun. Sometimes it happens that we would like to have a tool that allows us to filter the logs according to specific criteria. A tool that goes beyond a simple cat logs/frontend_dev.log | grep SELECT. We wanted to perform some analysis on the website usage, basically to help us improve it performance.
A colleague talked about Facebook Scribe, that was not actually related with this dream tool but later lead me to learn about the existence of the Apache Hive project (which was started by Facebook).
I think a common problem for some symfony developers that aren’t too familiar with Apache’s Mod Rewrite is when they move from a development environment that uses an explicit controller (e.g. frontend_dev.php is requested from the server explicitly) to their production app which implicitly calls index.php (e.g. ‘/’ or some other route is passed to index.php) things stop working.
I recently released a new symfony plug-in, called sfWebBrowser. It's a lightweight HTTP client written in PHP, that doesn't require any additional module to work, and it opens a lot of interesting possibilities. As a matter of fact, it doesn't even require symfony to work - you can use it on any application, with any framework. Refer to its wiki page for installation instructions.
Many web 2.0 applications reuse content from other sites, mostly through REST web services and RSS feeds. The sfWebBrowser plugin already allows you to do that in a very simple way. For instance, to use the symfony blog news feed as a data source, you just need these three lines:
GeoRSS is an extension of RSS that incorporates geographic data (i.e. latitude/longitude coordinates). This is useful for plotting any data that might need to be placed on a map.
Okay kids. This is the part of the program where we explain what we are aiming for, what we already have and take pot shots at the feeble minded. Maybe not that last bit so much.
GeoRSS is an extension of RSS that incorporates geographic data (i.e. latitude/longitude coordinates). This is useful for plotting any data that might need to be placed on a map.
While building out the reviewsby.us map, I decided to use the Yahoo! Maps API versus the Google Maps API because I wanted to gain some familiarity with another API.
It was worth trying Yahoo!’s API. First of all, reviewsby.us has addresses for restaurants and Yahoo! provides a simple Geocoding REST service. This made it easy for me to convert street addresses to latitude and longitude pairs (even though this wasn’t required as we’ll soon see).1 The real selling point of Yahoo! was the GeoRSS functionality. I can extend an RSS feed (which symfony generates quite easily) to add latitude or longitude points (or even the street address), direct my Yahoo! map to the feed and voila, all the locations in that feed are now on the map, and when I click on them, the RSS item is displayed. That cut down on a lot of development time.
The symfony advent calendar is a set of 24 tutorials, published day-by-day between December 1st and Christmas.
That's right, every day a new tutorial will be published. Each tutorial is meant to last less than one hour, and will be the occasion to see the ongoing development of a web 2.0 application with symfony, from A to Z.
For Christmas time, the resulting application will be put online, and the source code made open source. This application will be usable, interesting, useful, and fun.
