Greetings!

[Andou]

Hello everyone! Joined because I did a bit too much lurking and fell down the PHP rabbit hole. I did try to go through Learn PHP The Right Way but gave up. I suppose there's room for a second chance (after I couldn't wrap my head around Smarty and Twig).

I'm a hobbyist programmer and college student. I generally program in Python, having learned Java over 2020 and almost certainly forgotten about it, but there's something about PHP that seems interesting. Besides the fact a ton of websites run on it and it's easy to pick up (not necessarily master, though).

I did mess around with Symfony and Laravel (truth be told, I preferred the former more) but never really dipped my toes in far enough. Hopefully that will soon change.

[kicken]

Greetings,

Laravel is popular, but I also find Symfony to be better.  A lot of stuff (including Laravel) uses Symfony components under the hood so it's good to know it as well. 

Symfony uses Twig by default for it's templates.  Twig has a lot of features, but at it's most basic level is fairly simple.  You make one base template that defines your site structure then put

{% block Blah '' %} 

anywhere that you want to be able to add content.  Then you make a second file for your page and use

{% extends 'base.html.twig' %}
{% block Blah %}<p>The content</p>{% endblock %}

To specify the content to be placed in said block.

Keep up the learning and it'll all click eventually.  PHP is a great and versatile language, and if you use it well and learn good design/architecture (which Symfony helps with I think) you can carry that knowledge over to other languages.

 

[Olumide]

3 hours ago, kicken said:

Greetings,

Laravel is popular, but I also find Symfony to be better.  A lot of stuff (including Laravel) uses Symfony components under the hood so it's good to know it as well. 

Symfony uses Twig by default for it's templates.  Twig has a lot of features, but at it's most basic level is fairly simple.  You make one base template that defines your site structure then put

{% block Blah '' %} 

anywhere that you want to be able to add content.  Then you make a second file for your page and use

{% extends 'base.html.twig' %}
{% block Blah %}<p>The content</p>{% endblock %}

To specify the content to be placed in said block.

Keep up the learning and it'll all click eventually.  PHP is a great and versatile language, and if you use it well and learn good design/architecture (which Symfony helps with I think) you can carry that knowledge over to other languages.

 

Please can you give me any link to learn the symfony in an easier mode as a beginner?

[Andou]

11 minutes ago, Olumide said:

Please can you give me any link to learn the symfony in an easier mode as a beginner?

Symfony has a free book (which you can also buy if you really want). That's how I tried to learn it, anyway. There's also SymfonyCasts (which are video tutorials), really nice but you do have to pay for (most of) them.

Edited January 9 by Andou
you don't have to pay for all of them (I double checked)

[Olumide]

5 minutes ago, Andou said:

Symfony has a free book (which you can also buy if you really want). That's how I tried to learn it, anyway. There's also SymfonyCasts (which are video tutorials), really nice but you do have to pay for them.

Programming is good and funs but I am always baffled because there are many programming languages and more are still emerging.

During my university days, I was only thought the basic QBasic, Fortran, MATLAB, C++, Assembly Language, Java, and Internet of a thing. 

[Olumide]

I assumed symfony does not support MySQL database.

Edited January 9 by Olumide
Typos error

[Andou]

3 minutes ago, Olumide said:

I assumed symfony does not support MySQL database.

https://symfony.com/doc/current/doctrine.html

"Symfony provides all the tools you need to use databases in your applications thanks to Doctrine, the best set of PHP libraries to work with databases. These tools support relational databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL and also NoSQL databases like MongoDB."

I think it's just a case of learning and figuring it out.

[gizmola]

55 minutes ago, Olumide said:

I assumed symfony does not support MySQL database.

Symfony is typically used with the Doctrine Object Relational Mapper (ORM) library.  The projects have long had a close collaboration.  Having done projects with many different frameworks over the years, my preference would be to use Doctrine as an ORM vs. alternatives like Laravel's Eloquent. 

One reason for this, is that Eloquent is an implementation of the "Active Record" pattern, whereas, Doctrine is an implementation of the "Data Mapper" pattern.  These are differing approaches to how ORMS are designed to work. You can find many active record ORM's in the PHP world, going back to frameworks like CakePHP.  

ORM's aren't quite as useful when using NoSQL databases like MongoDB.  I did a project where there was a mix of data persistence between MySQL and MongoDB, and there was some utility in using Doctrine to interface with both, but many of the features of an ORM are specific to relational databases, and document databases are just an entirely different way of looking at things with different strengths and weaknesses.  

However, to conclude, Doctrine is a really great ORM to use with MySQL, and it is well integrated into Symfony, should you want to use it.

[gizmola]

6 hours ago, Andou said:

Hello everyone! Joined because I did a bit too much lurking and fell down the PHP rabbit hole. I did try to go through Learn PHP The Right Way but gave up. I suppose there's room for a second chance (after I couldn't wrap my head around Smarty and Twig).

I'm a hobbyist programmer and college student. I generally program in Python, having learned Java over 2020 and almost certainly forgotten about it, but there's something about PHP that seems interesting. Besides the fact a ton of websites run on it and it's easy to pick up (not necessarily master, though).

I did mess around with Symfony and Laravel (truth be told, I preferred the former more) but never really dipped my toes in far enough. Hopefully that will soon change.

 

The commonality of most frameworks, is that most of them are built using Object orientated design patterns, typically implementing the "Model View Controller" (MVC) pattern.  

The model layer, when using a relational database is also an ORM.

Symfony (and Laravel) are also frameworks, where the underlying pattern of library design is known as "Dependency Injection" (DI).  A big benefit in using Symfony or Laravel, is that they facilitate the use of components as services, and you also can easily write your own classes that can be used as services.  A quick example, that is frequently needed would be email services in the application.  Typically you add the mailing component library to your project, do a bit of config (and in many cases the basic config gets added for you if you use a symfony recipe package) and at that point actually using the library is trivial.  The "Dependency Injection Container" that comes with symfony can make decisions on when to load a library that is required (or not).  It is thus important to learn something about DI design for use in your own classes.  

The originator/project lead of Symfony wrote these articles back in 2009, and I still recommend them to anyone trying to understand Dependency injection as a pattern.  Read here -> http://fabien.potencier.org/what-is-dependency-injection.html

Once you have more comfort with Oop, and at least a basic appreciation of the existence of OOP design patterns, you will have a lot more comfort using any framework.  People who really are just trying to wade through a sophisticated framework without any understanding of how/why, can easily get lost, or have the feeling of not knowing what to do when they encounter an issue.

With that said, here's a solid free course in Symfony 6, which if you can follow it, you will give you a good foothold in Symfony:  

 

 

I am a long time Symfony user, going back to symfony 1, and the earliest versions of symfony 2.  Symfony 1 was an entirely different framework, and 2 was a very influential ground up rewrite that was intended to be a Dependency Injection framework from the start.  Almost every major component from Doctrine to Twig was based upon the existence and design philosophy of some other popular library from the Java world or in the case of Twig, from Python's Jinja and Django projects.  

In most cases all frameworks start with models (the data persistence in a database) and routing configuration into controllers.  Views are "templates".  This is where you concentrate your markup code where appropriate.  Beyond that, a lot of the really good stuff in Symfony or Laravel is in handling of dependency injection, and in providing for features like "event handling" or "security" or "form building and handling".  Really smart people have worked on these frameworks and generally use well known and applicable object oriented design patterns like in the case of Laravel for example, the "Chain of Responsibility" pattern.  They don't come right out and say that, but after you study patterns a bit and look at how some of these features work, you may recognize them.  

You don't need to know any of this to build apps with these frameworks, but you do need to understand basic PHP oop, and interfaces, type hinting, annotations (and now in PHP 8, attributes which have basically replaced the need for annotations) inheritance etc.

You MUST get comfortable with Composer.  You MUST understand autoloading.  You MUST understand how autoloading works with your own classes, and where to put those when you need them.  It is possible to do full apps just using the models/controllers/twig templates in the places the symfony manual and tutorials tell you to put them, although this will often lead to lots of "not DRY" code and fat controllers.  From a learning standpoint, that's somewhat natural, and nothing to worry about, but eventually you will probably see the problems and seek to remedy them by creating your own classes, which will then be used as services in your controller code.  

Last but not least, I highly recommend getting a handle on unit tests, and how to write and run them.  Test coverage is another area where these frameworks are an amazing value because the developers have worked hard to provide unit tests for their code, so there's a high degree of built in quality.  

There are lots of frameworks out there, where people did their own take on a framework, and inevitably, they lack unit tests, documentation etc..

One last thing on Symfonycasts.  Symfonycasts is a superb resource, started by the long time Symfony documentation lead, Ryan Weaver.  The tech built into the tutorial system is fantastic.  Full transcription, and code snippets built into everything, so you can alternate between reading or watching as you desire.  It costs $25 a month, and if you simply want to learn Symfony in all its sophistication, it's highly worth it, as you can sit down and power through the material in directed fashion.  There is a huge amount of material they have covered, but it can also be dense.   With the proliferation of javascript UI/UX frameworks like React and Vue, people aren't building apps the same way anymore, and there are a lot more apps where the backend is a REST api, and the frontend is built using a javascript framework, and pulls the data from the backend as a REST client.  Ryan has been adding a lot of content in these areas, reflecting the state of the art, and where the professional developer market has been going.  

I would suggest getting a handle on the traditional first, and then perhaps looking at some of these emerging techs that look to better bridge frontend/backend code.  What I wouldn't recommend is buying a year subscription to save some bucks, and then finding out you didn't get enough use out of the subscription.  Better to pay the higher monthly and make sure you are getting value out of it.

Last but not least, I really like "Programming with GIO"'s youtube channel for foundational state of the art PHP and things like autoloading/composer/core OOP etc.  It's free, and as good and probably better than a lot of paid courseware.  Symfonycasts and Laracasts both have that material available (sometimes free) but in my opinion you want to spend your time on the stuff that is specific to symfony or laravel rather than the general stuff, should you subscribe to these services in order to advance your education in how to use them.