I'm still ready & willing to hire a #PHP internals coder to work on PHP fulltime. Amazing place to work: http://t.co/GX4wtPSc
— Don MacAskill (@DonMacAskill) January 18, 2013

This article is part of a series of articles that explains how to pack a Symfony full-stack application in one file. The first article explains why this might actually be useful: 1) Introduction, 2) Bootstrapping, ...

The most common way to create a Symfony project is to start with the Symfony Standard Edition: it defines a sensible directory structure for your project and it make things a lot easier when someone want to take over an existing project as he knows where the templates, the controllers, or the configuration are stored. So, let's start our journey with the Symfony Standard Edition:

$ composer.phar create-project -n symfony/framework-standard-edition se/ 2.3.0

From there, let's remove a bunch of code to get the bare minimum of code needed to keep it working:

rm -rf LICENSE README.md UPGRADE* bin/ app/SymfonyRequirements.php \
       app/autoload.php app/bootstrap.php.cache app/AppCache.php app/check.php \
       app/console app/phpunit.xml.dist app/Resources src/ web/config.php \
       web/favicon.ico web/robots.txt web/apple-touch-icon.png web/app.php web/bundles/ \
       app/cache/* app/log/* .travis.yml app/.htaccess web/.htaccess
 

I've removed all those files and directories because there are not needed for the purpose of our challenge.

Next, let's simplify the configuration and move everything into just one file:

# app/config/config_dev.yml
framework:
    secret:          $ecret
    router:
        resource: "%kernel.root_dir%/config/routing_dev.yml"
    form:            ~
    csrf_protection: ~
    validation:      { enable_annotations: true }
    templating:
        engines: ['twig']
    session:         ~
    fragments:       ~
 

The routing_dev.yml file has been emptied for now, and all other configuration files have been removed.

We can also remove most of the bundles from the application kernel class:

use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\Kernel;
use Symfony\Component\Config\Loader\LoaderInterface;
 
class AppKernel extends Kernel
{
    public function registerBundles()
    {
        return array(
            new Symfony\Bundle\FrameworkBundle\FrameworkBundle(),
            new Symfony\Bundle\TwigBundle\TwigBundle(),
        );
    }
 
    public function registerContainerConfiguration(LoaderInterface $loader)
    {
        $loader->load(__DIR__.'/config/config_'.$this->getEnvironment().'.yml');
    }
}
 

We can also simplify the web/app_dev.php code:

use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Request;
use Symfony\Component\Debug\Debug;
 
require_once __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';
Debug::enable();
 
require_once __DIR__.'/../app/AppKernel.php';
 
$kernel = new AppKernel('dev', true);
$request = Request::

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2876 bytes)

We’ve got an interesting talk on PHP’s Composer project slated for our next PHP user group in Raleigh with our very own Jason Grimes - definitely looking forward to this one (come on out if you’re anywhere near the area!)  If you don’t follow Jason already, get to it – he’s got a lot of useful stuff on his blog.

The indieconf conference for web freelancers is coming again this year – still nailing down a date – but the call for presenters is open right now – submit your proposal to present if you’re interested in joining us this year!

It’s hard to believe 2013 is almost half over already!!!

I'm currently working on a book for web freelancers, covering everything you need to know to get started or just get better. Want to stay updated? Sign up for my mailing list to get updates when the book is ready to be released!

Get notified when the book is available!

]]>PHP Classeshttp://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/209-PHP-55-Release-Date-Imminent--Lately-in-PHP-podcast-episode-36.html2013-06-17T09:42:00Z2013-06-17T09:42:00Z

PHP 5.5 Release Date Imminent - Lately in PHP podcast episode 36

By Manuel Lemos

The PHP 5.5.0 final release is about to happen. After about 16 months of development PHP 5.5 is bringing even more maturity to the PHP language, which by Google numbers is present in 75% of the Web sites.

This was one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in the episode 36 of the Lately in PHP podcast.

They also discussed some new features proposed for PHP 5.6 like incremental decoding of large JSON data streams and overloading arithmetic operators for arbitrary precision math.

They also debated the meaning of Google finally adding support to PHP in their cloud hosting platform Google AppEngine.

Also in this episode it was discussed an article about good practices to quickly detect and fix PHP code bugs that only show up in production environments.

Listen to the podcast, or watched the Google hangout video, or read the text transcript to learn more about these very interesting PHP topics.

]]>Fabien Potencierhttp://fabien.potencier.org/article/69/packing-a-symfony-full-stack-framework-application-in-one-file-introduction2013-06-17T08:00:00Z2013-06-17T08:00:00Z

This article is part of a series of articles that explains how to pack a Symfony full-stack application in one file. The first article explains why this might actually be useful: 1) Introduction, 2) Bootstrapping, ...

Sometimes, I'm wondering if I'm not just completely crazy. I like small things, but I'm the author of Symfony, a not-so-small framework (about eighty thousand lines of code excluding comments as of today). And that's probably because I like to push the limits of what's possible when coding.

In 1985, my first useful piece of code was about managing a portfolio of stocks for my parents. I was twelve years old at that time. I won a contest. It was an interesting challenge: coding a full game in less than 10 lines of code. And my code was published in a French magazine.

In 2009, I tweeted an implementation of a dependency injection container in less than 140 characters (I did the same with a web framework).

And most of the time, those experiments helped me get to the next level. Twittee, my service container that fits in a Tweet, was an experiment, but then, it became Pimple, a small dependency injection container that is used today in Silex, a micro-framework based on the Symfony components.

So, that's not about just trying to push the limits, or trying to have fun. It's also about experimenting different approaches to known problems and see if they can have practical usage.

So, 2013... time for another challenge, right? What about packing a Symfony full-stack application in a single file. No Silex, no phar allowed, no compilation phase, just everything in a single readable file: from assets to controllers, from templates to Composer configuration.

Why?

This is yet another step toward my Quest of the PHP Holy Grail. But besides being a though challenge, there are many other reasons that makes it interesting for everyone.

First, that's a good way to learn more about the Symfony internals and especially about the Kernel class. Nowadays, thanks to all the talks about HttpKernel given by various speakers at various conferences, and thanks to my series of articles about it on my blog, a lot of developers understand how Symfony handles requests and how it manages the conversion to responses. There is even a full chapter about it in the official documentation.

But the Symfony Kernel is less well-known. This is a shame as it is also a very interesting piece of software. I hope that this challenge will give you more information about the Symfony Kernel and that, as a result, more Open-Source projects will adopt it instead of just using the components.

Then, I want to showcase once more the flexibility of the Symfony core framework and the decoupling between all aspects of the framework. If you are just a Symfony developer, you might not realize how the low level architecture of Symfony works, and I'm going to give you some insights about it.

Also, there is a more practical usage: bug reporting. When you report a Symfony bug, sometimes, it is not that easy to reproduce it. Probably because it involves third-party bundles, a specific configuration, or a chain of controller calls. For such bugs, it is almost impossible to make a patch without a way to reproduce it. As a matter of fact, we often ask reporters to fork the Symfony Standard Edition and modify it in a way that exhibits the issue. But doing so is tedious for both the reporter and the developer that will try to fix the bug. Doing the same with Silex is more easier as most of the time, the reporter is able to package everything is a single file. So, being able to do the same with the full-stack framework would be a huge step forward.

Reporting bugs is fine, but being able to experiment things in a small environment also helps. A few weeks ago, Jordi submitted a new API layer to simplify the configuration of Symfony's Security. To better understand how to use it and to get a feeling for the new API, I decided to create

Truncated by Planet PHP, read more at the original (another 2550 bytes)

]]>Anthony Ferrarahttp://blog.ircmaxell.com/2013/06/google-glass-first-impression.html2013-06-17T00:49:00Z2013-06-17T00:49:00ZThis past Thursday evening I picked up my Explorer edition of Google Glass. I was lucky enough to have my #ifihadglass tweet chosen to receive the chance to pay an arm and a leg to get them. Needless to say, I did choose to pony up the cash, and on Thursday evening I walked home with my brand new piece of technology dangling off of my right temple. Since first impressions are often strong, but can be misleading, I chose to wait until I had used them for a few days before writing my thoughts. So here they are:

Transient (temporary) errors are rarely observed with MySQL Replication but can be seen with MySQL Cluster. MySQL Cluster is an eager (synchronous) update anywhere (multi-master) cluster: all replicas accept reads and writes, replication is synchronous. See also the slide deck DIY: A distributed database cluster, or: MySQL Cluster for a brief introduction in distributed database theory relevant to MySQL users (presentation from the International PHP Conference 2013 Spring Edition).

Transient errors

MySQL Cluster scales well for write loads because it features transparent sharding (see slides). It automatically partitions data over multiple replicas. Over the time, for example, when adding replicas to the cluster, data may b redistributed. Rebalancing is an online operation, it does not lock out clients. Thus, you may observe a temporary error such as:

ERROR 1297 (HY000): Got temporary error 1204 'Temporary
failure, distribution changed' from NDBCLUSTER 

{
  "myapp": {
    [...]
    "transient_error": {
      "mysql_error_codes": [
        1297
      ],
      "max_retries": 2,
      "usleep_retry": 100
    }
  }
}

$stats = mysqlnd_ms_get_stats();
printf("Implicit retries to hide transient errors: %d", 
  $stats['transient_error_retries']);