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Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by La veille du week-end (vingt-huitième) | LoïcG

La veille du week-end (vingt-huitième) | LoïcG — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 08:20:14 +0000

[...] Symfony2 Form Architecture : via @mojoLyon [...]

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by Christoph Hautzinger

Christoph Hautzinger — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 16:31:18 +0000

Hey Bernhard, thanks for your very good post about Symfony2 forms architecture.

I wish, all the symfony components would have such a great architectural-documentation.

Keep up the good work!

Christoph

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by Bernhard

Bernhard — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:24:55 +0000

@Hari: It is true that the whole, feature-complete form component (including all of the extensions) has many dependencies. But this is not really avoidable. The form component contentrates on what it can do best – abstracting and processing forms. It doesn’t care about validation, output escaping, templating etc., and uses external libraries for that purpose. If you don’t like the external libraries, you can implement your own layer that uses your own library.

@Daniel: I’m aware of these problems and want to fix them soon.

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:43:47 +0000

The biggest problem with third parties adopting Symfony forms is how they handle validation and form data.

Everything is geared towards hydrating objects with Symfony’s validation attached there to (either through DI, annotations, or what have you) and it’s very unwieldy to operate outside of a Symfony2 context.

I recently integrated Symfony2 Form into a SlimPHP application and while it got off the ground fairly well (documentation on integration outside of Symfony is very weak, took some hacking to figure out how to get it up and running) the validation was a mess. I had to bring in Symfony2 Validation (which honestly is okay) but integrated it in a weird fashion.

If you check out this pastie: http://pastie.org/3543000 that is what I had to do to validate this checkout form.

Preferably validation constraints would be attached to each field at scaffold time, since validators are ALREADY associated with a field. The architecture decision wouldn’t be as painful if setting a field required validated on the backend (it does not, it only sets the required html5 attribute, you have to add the notblank validator by hand).

Not to completely knock it, it integrated well (if a bit painful due to lack of documentation). The validation workflow however is going to be the biggest pain they have and is an area that needs major improvement.

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by Lukas

Lukas — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:14:51 +0000

@chris: Monolog provides a fair number of things that Zend_Log didn’t. Not sure if at the time of the switch it was ported to namespaces yet. BTW Monolog is a PHP port of a very mature Python library (same applies to Assetic too btw).

Now as for what ZF has that Symfony2 doesn’t. Quite a lot outside of the MVC.

For example the Feed component in ZF is probably the best library for handling RSS/Atom feeds since it surpassed the PEAR library with the last big iteration.

Then there is still like the Services components which mostly provide stuff that I have not seen anyone in the Symfony2 community.

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by chris

chris — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:15:30 +0000

I’m curious…it was mentioned above that Symfony used to use Zend_Log in its logging, but that it no longer does. So I see a lot of “Zend Framework is duplicating what Symfony does” but not a lot of “Zend Framework’s ____ component does this better, Symfony devs should use that”. Last time I checked, interoperability is a two-way street.

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by Hari K T

Hari K T — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 10:11:55 +0000

Great Post to learn about the Symfony 2 form, and how it was born.
I don’t have any disrespect for Symfony2 or ZF2 .
If the API name is same, doesn’t means the inner codes are also same . I don’t even know how many of you tried Symfony2 form to make use of a Standalone component .
The people who says its standalone is not the real fact, they really need to make some changes in-order to incorporate and which may be hard to look, and learn why the implementation was made.
I recently wrote a blog post regarding my experience working with Symfony2 form , and also have a link to a form component which seems almost standalone .
You can read the post over http://harikt.com/standalone-form-component-for-php
I am open to hear your feedback too .

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by Stephen S. Musoke

Stephen S. Musoke — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 09:41:49 +0000

First of all I am a Zend Framework 1 developer, who has been enviously eyeing Symfony2 for some time, but cannot use it in my day-to-day work because of other developers in my team.

However I have just completed an integration activity to use Symfony2 validators with Doctrine2 in ZF1, and I have to say it was an eye opening experience, since each of the Symfony components is stand alone so you can use it without the others, which is excellent foresight and can only be compared to what Rod Johnson of Springsource did for Java a few years ago. Disruptive innovation to simplify development.

Egos aside, ZF2 is still in beta while Symfony2 is already in production and growing by leaps and bounds, so the view and form layers are things that I see they should collaborate on, just like Symfony uses Doctrine2 Annotations support.

Drupal has chosen Symfony2 as the basis for the CMS, but is contributing rigorous documentation standards to the project which in my case is a +10000.

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by umpirsky

umpirsky — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 08:25:42 +0000

It’s really sad that both Zend and Symfony ignore each other. I remember when Symfon2 used Zend_Log in early days, but then replaced it with monolog. They are both on github and should work together whenever that have sense. That woul be great for PHP community.

Comment on Symfony2 Form Architecture by Klemens Ullmann-Marx

Klemens Ullmann-Marx — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 07:17:34 +0000

Thank you for this interesting post Bernhard. I didn’t have time to look into symfony2 yet, but the form area is surly a topic where much can be improved, and standardised. Your effort is welcome.