Editorial
Renovating Applications
with Symfony
Oscar Merida
The Symfony project has had a
profound influence on the PHP
ecosystem since its first release in 2005.
Projects including Drupal, Laravel, and
countless custom web applications, use
Symfony components. This month, we
look at the new features of Symfony 4
and how to modernize legacy code.
Last month, I got to spend three days
at DrupalGovCon, which is a huge
event near Washington, D.C. for the
Drupal community. I’m always happy
to see the progress they’ve made in
“getting off the island.” A big part of that
was adopting Symfony components in
key places in Drupal core. I noticed
on the schedule multiple sessions that
would fit perfectly in any PHP confer-
ence: how to use Composer, using
services, debugging with Xdebug, and
more. Of course, it hasn’t been a tran-
sition without some bumps along the
way, from what I’ve heard, especially
regarding using Composer to build
Drupal sites. If you’re looking to attend
a different meet up near you, check out
one that is PHP-adjacent. Whether it’s
Drupal, WordPress, or another applica-
tion, you can share your PHP expertise
and—who knows—you might learn
something too.
In This Issue
Antonio Peric-Mazar has a thor-
ough look at Symfony 4: A New Way to
Develop Applications. He looks briefly at
the history of the project, its evolution
from a monolithic framework to be
more componentized, and then at how
Flex and other changes have improved
the Developer Experience. In How to
Deal with Legacy Code, Paweł Lewtak
returns to share how he views working
established applications and how you
can use them as an opportunity to
expand your skillset. To follow that up,if you do need to update your code-
base, Tomas Votruba shares how to
do it automatically with Rector in Can
You Migrate Any Legacy Code Under
One Month?. He has some interesting
examples of refactoring code patterns
programmatically. In Cultivating a
Community: Five Things I’ve Learned
Running a PHP User Group, Karl
Hughes shares a look behind the scenes
running the Chicago PHP User group.
Chris Tankersley’s Education Station
continues looking at software design in
Writing DRY, SOLID FOSS OOP CRUD
Code. He rounds up some acronyms we
throw around frequently while sharing
how and when to use the principles they
describe. In Community Corner: Why
Soft Skills are Hard Skills, guest colum-
nist Gary Hockin steps in to correct the
record about the value of non-technical
skills and why you should develop
them. By request, Joe Ferguson starts
a series with an Introduction to PDF
Generation in The Workshop. He’ll be
surveying the solutions and libraries
you can use to create PDF documents.
In this first part, he gives a brief history
of the standard and looks at some basic
PDF generation tools which come with
PHP. In Internal Apparatus: Generated
Singletons, Edward Barnard returns
to reviewing generated opcodes to
get a better understanding of how the
Singleton pattern might work (or not).
Eli White concludes this issue with a
look at how far we’ve come in 25 Years
of PHP in this month’s finally{}. If you
weren’t around to code the first interac-
tive pages, check out the web developer
equivalent of walking up hill both ways
in the snow to get to school.Write For Us
If you would like to contribute,
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cle for our magazine.
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