Book: Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development

November 4th, 2009

Few weeks ago Packt Publishing sent me their new book called Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development to review. Ironically (or not) I'm not doing any active symfony development in the last few months, but I'm trying to be up to date with the news around symfony.

As title says the book is based on the upcoming 1.3 version of the framework. While building an application called The Milkshake Shop readers are introduced to the features that the framework can offer including some of the latest (and may a little bit not so good documented) ones like forms, routes, creating and packaging plugins and so on. There is also a whole chapter dedicated to performance and optimization. Full table of contents can be found here.

It was a surprise (at lest for me) to see that the ORM choosen for The Milkshake Shop (and the book) was Propel instead of Doctrine which was choosen as the default ORM framework.

However this book is a good foundation for everyone that's new to symfony world and also gives some more information about the features introduced in both 1.2 and 1.3 to the developers which are still doing their job using 1.0 version.

At the end the one thing that I didn't like in this book -
"Test-driven development is the key to bug-free and well-written code. Symfony provides the ability for unit and functional testing. Unit tests enable the developer to test functions and methods for input and output. While functionality tests helps the developer to test for functional issues that would be executed in the browser, Symfony has its own testing framework called Lime. This testing framework is useful for both unit testing and functional testing. All test output can be saved in the xUnit format." -

Believe it or not, but that's the only place where testing is mentioned (correct me of I'm wrong)! Seriously, if "Test-driven development is the key to bug-free and well-written code" give it a chapter or two. Or even better, build the whole app in a test-driven way.



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