Publisher: Packt Publishing (October 10, 2009) | 250 pages | ISBN: 1847194567 | PDF | 4.7 MB

Design, develop, and deploy feature-rich, high-performance PHP web applications using the Symfony framework

* Create powerful web applications by leveraging the power of this Model-View-Controller-based framework
* Covers all the new features of version 1.3 - many exciting plug-ins for you
* Learn by doing without getting into too much theoretical detail - create a "real-life" milkshake store application
* Includes best practices to shorten your development time and improve performance

In Detail
With its flexible architecture, the Symfony framework allows you to build modern web applications and web services easily and rapidly. The MVC components separate the logic from the user interface and therefore make developing, changing, and testing your applications much faster. Using Symfony you can minimize repetitive coding tasks, optimize performance, and easily integrate with other libraries and frameworks.

Although this framework contains with many powerful features, most developers do not exploit Symfony to its full potential.

This book makes it easy to get started and produce a powerful and professional-looking web site utilizing the many features of Symfony. Taking you through a real-life application, it covers all major Symfony framework features without pushing you into too much theoretical detail, as well as throwing some light on the best practices for rapid application development.

This book takes you through detailed examples as well as covering the foundations that you will need to get the most out of the Symfony framework. You will learn to shorten the development time of your complex applications and maintain them with ease. You will create several useful plug-ins and add them to your application and automate common tasks. The book also covers best practices and discussions on security and optimization. You will learn to utilize all major features of this framework by implementing them in your application.

By the end, you should have a good understanding of the development features of Symfony (for Propel as well as Doctrine editions), and be able to deploy a high-performance web site quite easily.

What you will learn from this book?

* Set up the foundations for a database-driven web site using Symfony
* Create a list of products by accessing data from a database, paginate the menu, and then customize its look
* Create forms--from simple contact forms to complex ones--with user-defined fields using sfFormExtraPlugin
* Send email notifications to the customers using PHP SwiftMailer library
* Create quick development task plug-ins to save your development time and package them into your application
* Configure and customize Symfony's admin generator to create a nice looking back-office
* Secure your backend application with the Symfony authentication mechanism, leveraging the power of the sfGuardPlug-in security and authentication plug-in
* Create an advanced admin panel with JavaScript that allows image files to be uploaded and thumbnails to be automatically generated
* Enhance your search mechanism by using the JQueryAutoComplete Widget to add an auto-complete feature to it
* Allow your users to choose their preferred language for display by introducing internationalization and localization to your application
* Integrate a component from another framework into your application with minimum effort
* Optimize the response time of your site by using compression and caching

Approach

This book is an example driven tutorial that takes you through the process of building Model-View-Controller-based web applications. You will create and develop an online store application. It also covers best practices for better and quicker application development.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for PHP web developers who want to get started with Symfony 1.3. If you are already using Symfony 1.0 or are new to Symfony, you will learn how to use it in the best way to produce better applications faster.

Basic knowledge of Object Oriented design and ORM will be quite helpful.

About the Author

Tim Bowler

Tim Bowler has a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, a Masters Degree in Internet Technologies and E-Commerce, and is currently studying for his PhD part time. He has over 10 years of experience in web application development and project management. His experience and determination has gained him membership in the Institute of Engineering and Technology and he is a Chartered IT Professional. Tim started his career developing web applications in PHP4 for a digital media agency in London. Later he introduced agile and scrum into the development process along with Symfony. Tim is now the Managing Director of Agile Labs which is a web application development and agile coaching company.

Wojciech Bancer

Wojciech Bancer has a Master's Science Degree in Computer Science. He has over 8 years experience in web application development. In 2007, after passing the Zend exam, he gained a Zend Certified Engineer for PHP5 certificate. Wojciech started his career developing web applications in PHP4 and PHP5, as a freelancer. Later he started working for a digital media agency in London, where he was introduced to Symfony and scrum process. Currently he is a Lead Developer at Agile Labs, which is a web application development and agile coaching company in London.
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