symfony Web PHP Framework » Askeet - symfony Advent Calendar

The symfony advent calendar is a set of 24 tutorials, published day-by-day between December 1st and Christmas.

That's right, every day a new tutorial will be published. Each tutorial is meant to last less than one hour, and will be the occasion to see the ongoing development of a web 2.0 application with symfony, from A to Z.

For Christmas time, the resulting application will be put online, and the source code made open source. This application will be usable, interesting, useful, and fun.

start reading day one »

day one: starting up a project
The objective of day one is to display a page of the application in a web browser, and to setup a professional development environment. This includes installation of symfony, creation of an application, web server configuration, and setup of a source version control system.
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day two: setting up a data model
The objectives for the second day are to define what the final result should be in terms of functionalities, sketch the data model, and begin coding. This will include generating an object-relational mapping and using it interactively to create, retrieve and update records in a database with an application scaffolding.
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day three: dive into the MVC architecture
The objectives for the third day are to define a nicer layout for the site, define the list of questions as the default homepage, show the number of users interested by one question, and populate the database from sample text files in order to have test data. That's not much to do, but quite a lot to read and understand.
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day four: refactoring
The objectives for the fourth day are to show the list of answers to a question, to give a nice URL to the question detail page, to add a custom class, and to move some chunk of codes to a better place. This should help you understand the concepts of template, model, routing policy, and refactoring. You may think that it is too early to rewrite code that is only a few days old, but we'll see how you feel about it at the end of this tutorial.
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day five: forms and pager
The objectives for day five are to allow a user to login and to paginate the list of questions on the home page. This will be quick to develop, but it will allow you to recover from yesterday.
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day six: security and form validation
During the fifth day, you got used to manipulating templates and actions; forms and pagers have no secrets for you anymore. But after building the login form, you probably expected us to show you how to restrict access to non-authorised users for a specific set of functionalities. That's what we are going to do today, together with some form validation.
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day seven: model and view manipulation
Today we will display the list of last questions asked and the last answers posted, the list of users interested by a question, the profile of a user, and we will add a navigation bar on every page to access these features. Because that wouldn't be much work for an hour, we will also setup the view configuration and have a look at what has been done during this week.
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day eight: AJAX interactions
If the base of data manipulation in the web has long been forms, today the AJAX techniques and usability enhancements can change the way an application is built. And that counts for askeet, too. This tutorial will show you how to add AJAX-enhanced interactions to askeet. The objective is to allow a registered user to declare its interest about a question.
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day nine: local improvements
During, the AJAX interactions were introduced in askeet, and without pain. The application is now quite usable, but could use a lot of little improvements. Rich text should be allowed in the questions `body`, potentially long lists should be paginated, and primary keys should not appear in the URIs. All that is not difficult to put in place with symfony: today will be a good occasion to practice what you already learned, and to check that you know how to manipulate all the layers of the MVC architecture.
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day ten: Alter data with Ajax forms
After yesterday's review of known techniques, some of you have a hunger for interaction. Displaying rich formatted questions and lists, even paginated, is not enough to make an application live. And the heart of the askeet concept is to allow any registered user to ask a new question, and any user to answer an existing one.
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day eleven: syndication feed
The askeet application is ready to be launched in a (early) beta stage. As a matter of fact, it could already seduce lots of users since the core features (ask questions, read answers, contribute new answers) are built. The trouble is that recurrent users will find it difficult to keep up-to-date with the latest events on the askeet website. You need to provide them with fresh news without effort, and there is a media for that: news feed. So let's add news feed to askeet today.
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day twelve: Emails
Symfony is not just about web pages, and today's tutorial will illustrate it again. We will send an email by taking advantage of the MVC implementation.
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day thirteen: Tags
Web 2.0 applications have come out with a new way of organizing items: tags. Tags are words, just as categories are. But the differences are that there is no hierarchy of tags, and that an item can have several tags. While finding a cat with categories could prove cumbersome (animal/mammal/four-legged/feline/, or other mysterious category names), it is very simple with tags (pet+cute). Add to that the ability for all users to add tags to a given question, and you get the famous concept of folksonomy.
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day fourteen: Tags, part II
There are two things that are left to do concerning tags, and they both sound quite 'web 2.0': the ability to add a new tag with an AJAX form, and the global askeet tag bubble. Are you ready to experience the agile development methods of symfony?
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day fifteen: Unit tests
Unit tests are one of the greatest advances in programming since object orientation. They allow for a safe developement process, refactoring without fear, and can sometimes replace documentation since it explains quite clearly what an application is supposed to do. Symfony supports and recommends unit testing, and provides tools for that. The overview of these tools - and the addition of a few unit tests to askeet - will take much of our time today.
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day sixteen: Lazy day
After fifteen hours of hard work, we all deserve some time off. So we have decided to declare the sixteenth day the lazy day, because getting some rest is always a good thing when developing web applications. There is no symfony tutorial published today, but there is still a lot to learn.
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day seventeen: API
The askeet application was just put online yesterday. We have planned a handful of advanced web application development techniques to show you through askeet, and the first to be revealed today is the programming of an external API requiring an HTTP authentication.
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day eighteen: Filters
We saw yesterday how to make the askeet service available through an XML API. Today's program will focus on filters, and we will illustrate their use with the creation of sub domains to askeet. For instance, 'php.askeet.com' will display only PHP tagged questions, and any new question posted in this domain will be tagged with 'php'. Let's call this new feature 'askeet universe' and develop it right away.
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day nineteen: Performance and cache
The overhead caused by a framework is a general concern, especially if your site is hosted in a shared server. Although symfony doesn't slow down the server response time very much, you might want to see it yourself and tweak the code to speed up the page delivery. So today's tutorial will be focused on the performance measurement and improvement.
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day twenty: Administration and moderation
The advent calendar tutorials are supposed to talk about the development of a web application using agile methods. However, until now, we talked a lot about coding and not that much about application development, and the relations between the requirements of a client and the functionalities implemented. The backend need will be a good opportunity to illustrate what comes before coding in agile development.
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day twenty-one: Search engine
The most popular suggestion about the 21st day addition proved to be a search engine.
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day twenty-two: Transfer to production
Yesterday, we added a back-office to askeet. So everything is ready for the application to actually run and be released on the Internet. This is the perfect moment to focus on the techniques involved in the synchronization of two servers, since you developed askeet on your computer and will probably host it in another server, connected to the Internet.
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day twenty-three: Internationalization
Now that you learnt how to transfer a symfony application to a production host, the askeet application can run everywhere. But what if someone decided to use it in a non-English speaking country like, say, France?
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day twenty-four: What's next?
For twenty-three days, we have been building a web 2.0 application in PHP5 with the symfony framework. But more than that, askeet is an open source project, and what comes next is, hopefully, a long story.
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Askeet - symfony Advent Calendar

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