I’ve always dabbled with programming – trying to deal with programmers over the years with my online efforts made it clear that if I wanted them to do something, it would be easier if I had an idea how it was going to get done. I played a bit with PHP, and a year or so back, I tried Symfony, which is a PHP MVC framework.
What’s a framework? Something that is supposed to make your life easier. Keyword: supposed to. As a non-programmer (or should I be kind to myself and call myself a beginning programmer?), this thing is FRUSTRATING. Like a hot bitchy French girl, getting Symfony to do what I wanted to was impossible. But, I saw that a new version was coming, and like that hot bitchy French girl, she was going to come back and do everything differently. Great. Maybe the second time would be better. Shelve Symfony until version 2 was ready.
Symfony2 is in public beta now, so I’ve downloaded Beta 3, and started hacking around. Yes, things have changed from Sf1 to Sf2. A lot. But some things actually make a bit more sense now. Here’s hoping.
I’ve also been looking around the web for examples of how to get things done. Some people have started to rewrite the old Sf1 docs for Sf2 – a great example being the Jobeet on Symfony2 project over at sftuts.com. If it gets finished, it will be a masterpiece.
One BIG gotcha I’ve found by attempting to cut and paste the work of others… a few months back, the Symfony developers, in their traditional mocking “I will fuck with you you stupid English speaking Capitalist Pigdog” way, made a simple change in the way you write code. Simple, small, but holy crap – it will fuck you up hard until you figure it out. They replaced a : with a \. As in ABC:def became ABC\def.
Please, everybody who has written “helpful” tutorials on Symfony – update the posts so : becomes \
Back to the trenches… let’s see what I can come up with.
Edit: Oh crap… Beta 4 is now out – wonder what they’ve completely changed this time?