Symfony

Symfony is an open-source set of web application components for MVC applications. It is also a full-stack framework with MVC structure that helps you create websites quicker. Additionally, it builds up an arrangement of best practices that will help you to create viable and secure sites. With Symfony, supporting best practices starts as soon as you want to install the framework itself.

Symfony was distributed in 2005 under the MIT Open Source license and today it is among the main and leading frameworks available for PHP development.

On the other hand, Drupal, phpBB, Laravel and eZ Publish are some of leading PHP projects that use Symfony components to build their applications.

Here is a portion of Symfony's key features

• a database free PHP structure
• simple to configure, install and extend
• easy to utilize
• can use various types of tools like Web Debug Toolbar
• compatible with MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, and many more.
• data and interface translation is permitted
• MVC driven outline
• ORM utilizing Doctrine or Propel
• Yaml records for arrangement
• Deal with Linux and Windows
• Use design and layout

Once you delve a little deeper into learning Symfony, you'll figure out how to use many different elements not mentioned above. Don't stress about getting stuck; with Symfony you'll have easy access to an immense amount of documentation, supported by a large and active community.

What is Symfony good for?

To make some improvements on the development side, Symfony is being used less for very demanding development and more for streamlined development. It is also easier to make or maintain applications or websites since it will be clear where the vital code is.

On other hand, Symfony offers complete adaptability for both novice and advanced users and also offers numerous caching mechanisms to enhance the frameworks performance.

These are some of the advantages of using Symfony:

• enhance the level of deliberation of the code
• gives an assortment of solutions for issues and ideas developers might have and helps reduce repetitive work
• deals with all the essential web development elements for you, for example, request headers and variables
• applies best practice, security practices to this information before it is even presented to the engineer
• includes a ton of built-in functionality for security components, for example, verification of clients for secure areas of your site, utilizing config documents and a little class writing.

Nowadays, there are lots of frameworks available in the market that can help developers create tons of application and make their system faster than before. The Symfony framework can help you to work that out.

Some examples and code snippets

Before introducing Symfony, let's assume as of now that you have already installed Apache, PHP 5 and MySQL in your work space, and that you're also familiar with object oriented programming, and using the command line. Just follow some steps below for installing Symfony on windows.

First step:

1. Go to My Computer -> Right Click -> Click on Properties -> Advanced Tab -> Environment Variables -> Create a PATH variable.

Note: If it doesn’t already exists -> Add C:PHP as the PATH variable value.

2. Go to Start -> Run -> Type cmd
3. Type the code below:

c:\> php -r "readfile('https://symfony.com/installer');" > symfony

Note: It will install Symfony's latest stable version for you. As of now the latest version that Symfony has is version 2.7. 

4. At that point, move the downloaded Symfony file to your demo’s directory and execute it as takes after:

c:\> move symfony c:\demo
c:\demo\> php symfony

Now that you have the Symfony structure installed we will figure out how to assemble our first venture into Symfony. 

Let’s create our first Symfony application using the code below:

# Windows
c:\> cd demo/
c:\demo\> php symfony new number

The command written above creates a new directory called “number” that contains a new project that is based on the most recent stable Symfony version available. What's more, the installer checks if your framework meets the specialized necessities to execute Symfony applications. If not, you'll see the rundown of changes expected to meet those prerequisites. 

To check that everything is running smoothly, we will check it by running the code below:

$ cd my_project_name/
$ php bin/console server:run

At that point, open your program and go to the http://localhost:8000/URL to see the Welcome Page of Symfony. Then let’s begin to create our simple application. 

Let's assume you need to make a page /fortunate/number - that produces a fortunate number and prints it. To do that, make a class and a method within it that will be executed when somebody goes to /fortunate/number:

// src/AppBundle/Controller/FortunateController.php
namespace AppBundle\Controller;

use Sensio\Bundle\FrameworkExtraBundle\Configuration\Route;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;

class FortunateController
{
   /**
    * @Route("/Fortunate/number")
    */
   public function numberAction()
   {
       $number = rand(0, 100);

       return new Response(
           '<html><body>Lucky number: '.$number.'</body></html>'
       );
   }
}

There you go, check this using this URL: “http://localhost:8000/URL”. If you see a fortunate number being printed back to you, congratulations! 

Conclusion

And now, we definitely know something about Symfony, and the best way to take in more is to practice, experience new use cases, find answers in the documentation and make inquiries. In the event that you truly need to master Symfony, just keep going through the documentation and keep up to date with the community.