[RFC|Accepted] Symfony 2

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Stefan Koopmanschap
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by Stefan Koopmanschap »

That's the whole concept of Symfony 2: making things easier and less complex. :)

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Handyman
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by Handyman »

Highway of Life wrote:
Obi_Wan wrote:I think it was symfony 2 I tried :)
Compare it to Code Igniter and tell me what you think. :)
I've been playing with several frameworks now and had a chance to look through the Symfony 2 code.
I'm going to go back on what I said on page 2
Handyman wrote:So I don't see any reason why we shouldn't use Symfony 2 for phpBB4
After looking through Symfony (both 1 and 2) and several other frameworks, my favourite framework by far is CodeIgniter. Their documentation is the best over all the other frameworks and their system is really easy to use.
Their framework is very fast, second currently to Yii, and they get one of the best feedback ratings of all the frameworks.
The one drawback right now is that it supports PHP 4 - if they were to update to PHP 5.3 only, I would hope we could use CodeIgniter for phpBB 4

I'm currently building an application on the CodeIgniter framework, using my template engine and Doctrine.
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Highway of Life
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by Highway of Life »

Stefan Koopmanschap wrote:That's the whole concept of Symfony 2: making things easier and less complex. :)
Okay, but you make me nervous when you tout the documentation for Symfony 1...
Stefan Koopmanschap wrote:Symfony is known for its great documentation
:shock: Huh?!.. My question to that is... “What documentation?”. Although the code is documented well, it’s (Symfony 1) by far the worst and least documented framework of any other framework I’ve seen from a usage standpoint for developers. phpBB3 is at least documented that well, and phpBB's code documentation has not been good until the phpBB wiki came along, and it’s still not that great. Sure I can see what parameters each function has, but that’s not good documentation. And doesn’t compare to actual decent User Guides like Doctrine and Code Igniter have. Even Zend Framework has a much better user guide.

I know it’s not done yet, but I shouldn’t be able to go through an entire user guide in under an hour.

It’s really no wonder Symfony has a reputation for being “Hard to Learn”. There is no decent documentation and the Symfony 1 code is really semi-obfuscated. I hope Symfony Reloaded is not hanging their hat on version 1, that would make me nervous of the quality of version 2. Sure features are great, but if you don’t have great code and documentation to back that up, it means nothing if people can’t use it and use it well. Remember the crowd for phpBB is not all professional PHP developers, they need more than just API docs for it to be useful.
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Stefan Koopmanschap
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by Stefan Koopmanschap »

Highway of Life wrote:
Stefan Koopmanschap wrote:That's the whole concept of Symfony 2: making things easier and less complex. :)
Okay, but you make me nervous when you tout the documentation for Symfony 1...
Stefan Koopmanschap wrote:Symfony is known for its great documentation
:shock: Huh?!.. My question to that is... “What documentation?”. Although the code is documented well, it’s (Symfony 1) by far the worst and least documented framework of any other framework I’ve seen from a usage standpoint for developers. phpBB3 is at least documented that well, and phpBB's code documentation has not been good until the phpBB wiki came along, and it’s still not that great. Sure I can see what parameters each function has, but that’s not good documentation. And doesn’t compare to actual decent User Guides like Doctrine and Code Igniter have. Even Zend Framework has a much better user guide.

I know it’s not done yet, but I shouldn’t be able to go through an entire user guide in under an hour.
Say what? Sure, the documentation for Symfony 2 is not done yet. Hell, the first preview release is out for less than a month. The final release is most probably getting here somewhere in Q4. Lots of time left for good documentation.

As for symfony 1: What do you mean, little documentation? We have a clear documentation page which includes the API docs you mentioned before, but also the reference book. More importantly, there are Jobeet for Doctrine and also for Propel which will take you through building a whole application using symfony. Then there is More with symfony which takes on a *beep* of more advanced topics related to symfony. And that's not even looking at the immense contributions by the community. Google for a specific problem in symfony and you'll usually have the answer in the first 10 results on Google.

How anyone is able to say that there is no or bad documentation for symfony goes beyond me

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Highway of Life
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by Highway of Life »

I’ll be honest, on that page I was trying to find such guides. It appeared that you have to buy those books at Amazon, I missed the [ Read ] links. :| Looking through those, I still haven’t found comparable docs for Symfony as many other PHP framework projects, but that is a great deal of documentation that I missed. :oops:
Stefan Koopmanschap wrote:Google for a specific problem in symfony and you'll usually have the answer in the first 10 results on Google.
You know this brings to mind Git. It’s a FANTASTIC system, yet horrible usability. Vague error messages and confusing (official) documentation make it difficult to use. The solution? Oh, just Google for any error and the first 10 results will give you an answer. I’m sorry but that does not mean that Git is easy to use, that it has good documentation, or that it’s usability doesn’t suck.
Yes, I LOVE Git, it’s easy for me to use (I’m on a Unix system), occasionally frustrating, but you have to admit that it’s learning curve is very difficult, many people would say that it’s hard to learn, and it’s true.

EDIT: I should clarify that the Git documentation is actually extensive, but confusing, and compared to SVN's docs, they just do not compare at all. It doesn't help the average programmer.
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by jessesanford »

I am an avid user of symfony and it is one of the best MVC frameworks available to PHP. Codeigniter is also nice but does not have the level of support that symfony has. Before this sets off another "my framework is better flame war" know this... I run both codeigniter AND symfony user groups here in NYC and I actually really like both of them. However I have fallen into using symfony more often in production environments for very large projects. I am willing to become a core contributor of this transition. In fact my company is willing to sponsor some of this development. What is the timeline for this?

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Highway of Life
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by Highway of Life »

I actually talked about that on the phpBB Weekly show yesterday, Symfony is great for really large projects, but could it be overkill for a phpBB sized project? Which I would consider a rather small to medium sized project. I haven’t yet needed support for CI because I found the documentation for it to be so much better and it’s a very easy-to-use framework. But CI won't work for phpBB4 because it’s not PHP5 OOP, even CI 2.0 could be an issue, they will be “dropping support” for PHP4, but I cannot find an indication if they are actually utilizing the full PHP5.2 or 5.3 potential, right now it does not appear so. KahonaPHP or Yii could be alternatives, however. My biggest concern is that many (most) MOD Authors for phpBB would find a Symfony type of framework to be much more difficult to learn (compared to a CakePHP or CodeIgniter framework).

phpBB4 is in planning stage right now, I’ve been watching the Symfony 2 development discussions, and they are still changing a lot of core code. Symfony 2 being in-development means that phpBB4 would be developing on a moving target unless phpBB waits until Symfony 2 is at least somewhat stable - late 2010 or so is when I guess development of phpBB4 could actually start on Symfony 2.
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by ToonArmy »

Highway of Life wrote:KahonaPHP or Yii could be alternatives, however.
Use Kohana at work, it lacks in areas and suffers from bad design in others.
Highway of Life wrote:My biggest concern is that many (most) MOD Authors for phpBB would find a Symfony type of framework to be much more difficult to learn (compared to a CakePHP or CodeIgniter framework).
What's a Symfony 'type' framework?
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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by naderman »

jessesanford wrote:I am an avid user of symfony and it is one of the best MVC frameworks available to PHP. Codeigniter is also nice but does not have the level of support that symfony has. Before this sets off another "my framework is better flame war" know this... I run both codeigniter AND symfony user groups here in NYC and I actually really like both of them. However I have fallen into using symfony more often in production environments for very large projects. I am willing to become a core contributor of this transition. In fact my company is willing to sponsor some of this development. What is the timeline for this?
Hey, sorry for not getting back to you earlier. I'm happy to hear you are interested in helping. Things are changing quite a bit at the moment. We've moved development from svn to git, and now the tracker from our own to JIRA. So things are a little slow right now. The focus will then be on version 3.1 which has its feature freeze date on May 31st. But I imagine that phpBB4 planning/development should pick up soon as well. So far there is essentially nothing. No code, no plan, no anything. There is no timeline. we have the stable 3.x releases that see regular updates, so we have no pressure to release phpBB 4 anytime soon. We'd rather get it right.

With regard to becoming a core contributor, development is entirely open, you can see absolutely everything there is to be found about phpBB 4 in this forum and the phpBB 4 area on the wiki (a lot of that doesn't even apply now that we want to use Symfony). So go ahead make suggestions, post RFCs, publish your code on github.

phpBB is developed by volunteers in their free time, so "sponsoring development" is not very straight forward. You can certainly sponsor by paying someone to contribute to phpBB since development is open, but you would have to find such a person yourself. You might be interested in the phpBB Libertyvasion Conference which is going to take place in NYC in August - we are still looking for sponsors for that event.

Again thanks for your interest and I hope we can get this project rolling soon.

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Re: [RFC] Symfony 2

Post by dams »

ok symfony2 has all the feature that phpbb4 need, but look the other side, what does phpbb dont need with symfony, there is a lot of things that is wasted on the size of the sourcecode it self, i like it cleaner and smaller instead, im still voting on makeing our own new framework that just what we need. try look at other forum software, we got to be better then them :)

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