phparchitect-2019-08

12 \ August 2019 \ http://www.phparch.com

Symfony 4: A New Way to Develop Applications

There are a few things you need to

consider when using autowiring, read

more at adayinthelifeof.nl^20.

• They do not work on scalar type
  hints, only objects. Meaning you
  cannot autowire strings, ints, or
  Booleans, for example. Symfony
  automatically throws an exception
  if it runs into this.


• Contrary to many people’s beliefs,
  autowiring does not impose a
  performance hit since all services
  are eventually compiled into a
  cacheable container file. However,
  when in dev mode, it might recom-
  pile more often when you modify
  classes, but unless you have very
  large projects, that should not be a
  problem.


• There is absolutely no need to use
  autowiring. Everything done with
  autowiring can be done by manual-
  ly defining services too. Autowiring
  removes the need to write large
  service files with boilerplate. You
  are not missing out on anything
  when you opt for not using autow-
  iring.


• Autowiring is not magic. It’s just
  Symfony trying to automatically
  inject services with other services
  based on their fully qualified class
  name.


• Marking our services private by
  default makes your app faster! It’s
  not huge, but private services are
  faster than public services

Symfony Webpack Encore

We notice in previous years that

frontend technologies are moving quite

fast, and in Symfony 3 AsseticBundle

for handling JS and CSS was not the

best solution. It was not very easy or

developer-friendly, so usually, devel-

opers set up some other solutions to

use. Webpack Encore to the rescue. It

allows us to integrate Webpack in our

Symfony application. It wraps Webpack

and gives us one additional layer on top

20 adayinthelifeof.nl: https://phpa.me/adayinthelife-autowire
21 frontend documentation: https://symfony.com/doc/current/frontend.html

22 release announcement: https://phpa.me/symfony-4-3-release

of it, giving us the ability to use it more

easily and increasing DX. To use it in a

project, you need to run:

composer require webpack-encore

You get the folder where your assets

go—./assets—and ./webpack.config.js

is where your configuration goes. You

can see an example in Figure 11.

Webpack Encore is very powerful;

optimizing and minimizing CSS and JS

files is just one of the features; for more

examples, check the frontend docu-

mentation^21.

You can use it for non-Symfony

applications also:

yarn add \@symfony/webpack-encore --dev

Updating to Symfony 4

Upgrading to Symfony 4 should not

be a problem. There is a little work,

like cleaning code, mostly service defi-

nitions (I hope you have tests). If you

are using Symfony 2, you should first

upgrade to Symfony 3.4 then move to

Symfony4. Why? Because they have the

same set of features—Symfony 4 is the

clean version with Flex. You need to

reorganize the folders and code a little

bit, and that takes some time, but it’s

worth it.

Symfony has a very well defined

release process, so in May 2019 they

released version 4.3, which is not an

LTS version. Even though there is no

Symfony 4 LTS version released yet, it

is worth upgrading to Symfony 4. You

can check the complete list of features

included in 4.3 in the release announce-

ment^22.

One Year After

I started using Symfony 4 a year ago,

and I got used to Symfony Flex and

autowiring quite quickly. I started with

a small project, building a web scraper

which grows in a matter of architecture

and complexity quite fast. However, I

Figure 11