Symfony 4: Removing the Mystery

The Beginners Symfony 4 tutorial is in progress. I have all but the final video recorded now. I ended up re-recording a number of sections in both of the recent video uploads:

Why?

One of the areas I found most confusing when first starting with Symfony was in the widespread use of Interfaces.

You may have encountered the following problem:

Let’s say you’re working under a tight deadline. You’re writing some Symfony Controller code and working with a form. It’s not going quite as smoothly as you’d like. You reckon something is going awry with the form submission.

Being the inquisitive developer, you remember the oft touted advice:

Read the source, Luke

The thing is, when you ctrl+click on $form->submit($request); you’re taken to… an interface.

This is good stuff.

Your life will be much easier if you code to an interface, rather than tie your methods to specific implementations.

However, with that deadline looming over your shoulder, such things are nice to know, but right now, just show me the code!

Finding An Implementation

When I first recorded this video I initially just said what the outcome of a call to the submit  method would be.

Watching back, I couldn’t help but think about that stuck, and stressed developer. Sat in a noisy office, headphones in, listening to music when you’d rather have peace and quiet.

Everyone around you seems to be goofing off whilst you’re struggling to think through this really important problem.

The last thing you need is to be met with this weird interface  thing. If only you could find the implementation then life would be a lot less stressful.

How can you find out what is really happening when you call $form->submit($request);?

And what happens when you find the implementation and even then the code is tricky to follow?

I know these feels.

That’s why when recording this video I worked hard to make sure you come out at the end with a good understanding of the code that makes this happen.

This is a beginners series for Symfony 4. This is the stuff that will make working with, and understanding Symfony that much easier.

I hope you enjoy it.


Site Stuff

There’s a ton of work going on behind the scenes at the moment.

Can I pay by PayPal?

This is one of the most frequently asked questions that I get.

Currently: no.

That sucks. I appreciate that.

The reasoning for this is that Stripe is super shiny and as a developer, they were high on my wish list of cool things to implement.

Also, from a code perspective Stripe is actually a joy to work with. They really are awesome.

But still, I get asked a lot for PayPal.

I’m adding PayPal.

It’s quite a big job, but I’m about 65% of the way through the implementation.

Here’s a sneak peak:

That’s the Stripe form using Stripe’s React elements.

PayPal functionality is provided through Braintree.

There’s a nice transition between the two options too, which came for free via Bootstrap 4 and I really like it.

I’ve been working on completely extracting the membership code.

Would you have any interest in seeing video tutorials on how to make your own Symfony bundles?

Leave a comment and let me know.

There’s some other cool features that this work enables, which I’ll share with you in a future update.

Until next time, have a great weekend and happy coding.

Chris

The First Symfony 4 Tutorial Is Here

This week saw six new videos added to the site.

These are the final four in the Docker Tutorial for Beginners series, and the first two in the Beginners Symfony 4 Tutorial series.

A tutorial on Symfony 4 has been highly requested since it released on 30th November 2017.

Since then we’ve had three patches, so we’re now on Symfony 4.0.3.

Have you tried it yet?

I Had My Doubts

I will be completely honest, for the longest time Symfony 4 scared me.

We switched from the Symfony 2 / Symfony 3 Standard Edition, to the Symfony 4 skeleton. From a nice “full stack” to a minimal, bare bones starting point.

The first time I used Symfony 4, I just couldn’t wrap my head around why they would remove most of the very useful things:

  • Monolog
  • Twig
  • Routing…

And then the more I read, the more I thought that the symfony/skeleton was taking Symfony to become a replacement Silex. And whilst I have used and quite like Silex, I preferred the Symfony Standard Edition / full-stack approach.

I also went into a panic as I thought pretty much everything on the CodeReviewVideos.com would be obsolete.

Moar Skellingtons

Thankfully, all my fears were eliminated when they released the symfony/website-skeleton.

For me, this is perfect.

All the benefits of why I use Symfony for all my web projects, with all the added new features and bug fixes.

And a bare bones edition for my command line apps.

My Favourite Video

Even though this is a Symfony 4 beginners series, the last two videos get a little geeky. I can’t help myself.

There’s a really interesting change in Symfony 4 with the way we use controllers.

It’s useful to know as a beginner, and hopefully it sparks your curiosity into knowing more about the “how” and “why” of Symfony generally.

This one should be useful even if you’re not a beginner.

Other Stuff

There’s a lot of other change in progress at the moment, particularly on the back end of the site.

I’ve been putting some of the front end tweaks live this morning, and these take on board the suggestions I’ve had from site visitors. Thank you for all your feedback I really appreciate it.

There are still 15 or so videos to come from this batch. I’m currently taking a break from editing to write this.

Ok, on that note, have a great weekend, and happy coding.

Chris – CodeReviewVideos.com