The Definitive Guide to Symfony (Expert's Voice in Open Source)

Developing a new web application should not mean reinventing the wheel. Thats why a framework is an essential item in your development toolbox. It helps you respect coding standards; write bulletproof, maintainable code; and focus on business rules rather than waste time on repetitive tasks. This book introduces you to symfony, the leading framework for PHP developers, showing you how to wield its many features to develop web applications faster and more efficiently, even if you only know a bit of PHP.

In The Definitive Guide to symfony, you will learn about the Model-View-Controller architecture and the crucial role it plays in making frameworks like symfony possible. The book also covers framework installation and configuration, and shows you how to build pages, deal with templates, manage requests and sessions, and communicate with databases and servers. You will see how symfony can make your life easier by effectively managing form data, enhancing the user experience with Ajax, internationalizing applications for a global audience, and using smart URLs. Authors Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier put a strong emphasis on the tools that symfony provides for professional environments, showing you how to take advantage of unit tests, scaffolding, plug-ins, the command line, and extensible configuration. And since frameworks often raise performance-related debate, this book will give you many tips and techniques for monitoring and improving your applications performance, from caching to expert configuration tweaks.

Always keen to offer practical instruction, the authors include a lot of code examples, expert tips, best practices, and illustrations throughout this book, with the goal of providing a resource that satisfies the educational needs of symfonys rapidly growing user community.

Web application frameworks are one of the today's hottest topics, presenting developers with proven solutions for building applications faster than ever. Spurred on by the enormous success of Ruby on Rails, frameworks are being built in a variety of other languages, with the bulk of activity surrounding PHP. While numerous framework projects are well under way, none are as mature nor as popular as Symfony (http: //www.symfony-project.com/). Bundled with numerous tools for helping document, debug, and test your applications, and developed in a manner encouraging agile development principles, Symfony is sparking the imagination of thousands of developers around the globe.

Authored by project and documentation leads Fabien Potencier and FranAois Zaninotto, The Definitive Guide to Symfony serves as a complete guide to all aspects of Symfony. Readers are guided through fundamental concepts such as installation, configuration, and security, followed by thorough discussion of advanced concepts such as scaffolding, routing, caching, and internationalization. Accompanied by hundreds of practical code examples, this book will help readers quickly master rapid application development using this popular framework.

Always keen to offer practical instruction, the authors include a lot of code examples, expert tips, best practices, and illustrations throughout this book, with the goal of providing a resource that satisfies the educational needs of symfony's rapidly growing user community.