On the SitePoint PHP blog today there's a new tutorial posted that gets into the details on one of the powerful (and most used) components of the Symfony framework, the Router, and how to interact with it via annotations. Symfony's route annotations allow you to define functionality at the controller level or via a YAML configuration file.

When you download the Standard Symfony 2 Distribution, it includes an interesting bundle named SensioFrameworkExtraBundle which implements a lot of great stuff, especially the opportunity to use annotations directly within your controllers. The idea behind this article is not to convice developers to embrace this way of doing, but to point the finger at an alternative method to easily configure controllers. Keep in mind that there is no magic recipe, it depends on what you need in each specific scenario. Symfony 2 implements a strong built-in component to manage all the routes of an application: the Routing Component. Basically, a route maps a URL to a controller action.

His example sets up a simple blog and compares the two ways of configuring the routing: one side putting it all in the YAML configuration and the other in the controller docblocks (annotations) themselves. He adds a base page for showing the listing of posts and a single article route, complete with slugs. He also shows how to add in some additional configuration handling to do things like set default values, making things required and enforcing the HTTP method on the request (GET, POST, PUT, etc)