Symfony Demo 1.0.0 released

February 10, 2017 • Published by Javier Eguiluz

The Symfony Demo application is a fully-functional Symfony application developed as a learning resource and the reference implementation of the Symfony Best Practices.

This application was introduced in April 2015 and the 1.0.0 version was tagged on February 7th, 2017. A lot of changes and improvements have been added to the application since the last time we talked about it:

2731bae, f8d63f8: added a paginator based on PagerFanta (@ccab)
e2d723c: added an example about how to use multiple form buttons (@voronkovich)
4dd93aa: added a Date Picker form field to show how to define custom types (@yceruto)
96bbeae: made error pages translatable (@bocharsky-bw)
895c518: added an example of how to use ESI caching (@sergiu-popa)
15ef2b7: updated the application's code to use as many modern PHP features as possible (@voronkovich)
d8ecd9f: stopped using Assetic to manage assets (@javiereguiluz)
84de97a: used dynamic environment variables for critical configuration options (@dzuelke)
4d93cda: added a RSS channel for blog posts (@yceruto)
e702851: added more examples of Doctrine relationships (@yceruto)
ebca80b: added a security voter to manage blog post permissions (@yceruto)
963c260: allow blog posts to add tags using JavaScript widgets and Symfony Form data transformers (@yceruto)
... and hundreds of other minor fixes and tweaks

In addition to being a learning resource, the Symfony Demo application can be used to showcase Symfony features, reproduce reported bugs, do performance benchmarks, etc. Thanks to the Symfony installer you can get it just by running the symfony demo command.

Finally, we would like to warmly thank the great work of our contributors, specially Yonel Ceruto, Victor Bocharsky, Oleg Voronkovich and Christophe Coevoet. If you want to support this project, don't forget to star the Symfony Demo project on GitHub.

Published in #Symfony

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Comments

Thomas Mester said on Feb 10, 2017 at 12:14

Waouw, that's really awesome. I like the fact we've a btn to see the current code of the page.

predoi dan costinel said on Feb 10, 2017 at 12:51

Really nice work guys!

Two things I want to ask:

What should we use instead of Assetic (what's the recommendation)?
Bernhard Schussek recommends us, when validating an entity, to import each validation class, and instead writing @Assert\NotBlank(), simply @NotBlank(). What's the "better" one?

Thanks.

Javier Eguiluz Certified said on Feb 10, 2017 at 14:17

@dan those are very good questions!

There's still no official replacement for Assetic ... but stay tuned for future news about this.
It's a matter of personal taste. Bernhard's recommendation probably looks better in the code ... but we still use the classic Symfony practice of importing @Assert. We could reconsider this in the next versions.

Martin Aarhof said on Feb 10, 2017 at 14:23

I think an API solution to CRUD blog posts also should be added to the demo. I think that frontend have moved away from using "static" PHP.

Christophe Coevoet said on Feb 10, 2017 at 16:42

Regarding annotations, importing a namespace makes the code more readable when you have multiple set of annotations in your entity (ORM, Validator, etc...) and lots of annotations coming from this namespace. But this is a matter of preferences.

Regarding the assets processing, you can keep using Assetic if it suits your need. I'm personally in the process of switching to a stack using the node tools directly (and having a npm run watch command in dev).

Kévin Dunglas said on Feb 10, 2017 at 18:49

@Martin Aarhof: There is a demo application of API Platform (an API framework built on top of Symfony I maintain) available here: https://demo.api-platform.com/

For assets, I also use frontend tools (Webpack). Splitting the frontend part (SPA) from the backend part (API) gain popularity in all ecosystems. Facebook provide a nice tool to bootstrap a SPA using React including assets management, debugging tools, linting, deployment options... https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app

Damjan Znidarsic said on Feb 10, 2017 at 20:21

https://github.com/symfony/symfony-demo/blob/master/src/AppBundle/Controller/BlogController.php#L100-L123

This is not a best practice, not in my book - Others mentioned before me, what happens when you want to create an API for that action?

I think you should be encouraging people to create services for these kinds of things - otherwise, people will just create massive controllers - just like I did 5 years ago when I was starting with Symfony. It took me years to figure out that's not how you write good software.

That's not to say I think the demo app is bad, but we might need to do some work to improve it and help people realize there's a more 'enterprise' way of writing code that comes with great benefits as well. I'm happy to help further this.

Akash Kumar Sharma said on Feb 11, 2017 at 15:33

This is pretty good. Reverse Engineering this will be fun.

Michael COULLERET said on Feb 13, 2017 at 08:54

It's great. It would not hurt to have a demo for a bundle, so represent best practices for him.

Don Omondi said on Feb 15, 2017 at 21:18

#10

I also think this is great, I remember starting out about 3 years ago and there was a demo application that I was using to learn Symfony, I think it was on tutorial.symblog.co.uk. So a demo supported by Symfony itself would be a great resource especially for beginners. The more demo apps the better :)

By the way, I have also gone on to also create a Symfony and EmberJS kickstart that you can find on github https://github.com/campus-discounts/embersy

Sebastián Poliak said on Feb 22, 2017 at 03:06

#11

Hi @Damjan Znidarsic. Which is the best way to manage form submission and get rid of that code inside controllers?