Stefan Koopmanschap has a new post to his site sharing some best practices with bundles in Symfony including structure of both the bundle and the application it lives in.

On one of my recent commutes I started listening to the Sound of Symfony podcast. As I had just discovered that one, I decided to listen to their most recent episode, which is on best practices for bundles. I quite disagreed with what was being said in the podcast. I started voicing my disagreement on Twitter but quickly decided that 140 characters is not enough to really explain my disagreement. So here's a blogpost.

He starts by talking about some of the current "best practices" documentation (like this book) and the parts of it he disagrees with. He talks about the use of the AppBundle, the general structure of a Symfony project and the use of bundles to provide better structure to your own code. He covers the placement of you code (your "domain") and the integration of the idea of bounded contexts. He finishes the post with some of his own experience with various frameworks and both good and bad project structures - and how sometimes the default framework structure isn't really what's needed.

NetTuts.com is back with another part in their "Programming with Yii2" series today. In this new post they focus on asset bundles, pieces of functionality that let you easily manage things like Javascript and CSS files automatically.

In this Programming With Yii2 series, I'm guiding readers in use of the newly upgraded Yii2 Framework for PHP. In this tutorial, I'll show you how to add custom JavaScript and CSS scripts and libraries to your Yii application. Yii uses a concept it calls Asset Bundles to make it easier to manage these resources. For these examples, we'll continue to build on the simple status application from previous tutorials.

They start with an introduction to asset bundles and how to set them up in the framework and the resulting HTML markup to include the involved files. They show you how to create a simple bundle and load it into your application. A screenshot is included showing a result of the inclusion.

Geshan Manandhar has a recent post that shares three Symfony bundles that can help you out greatly when creating RESTful applications and APIs. Links and a summary of each bundle are provided.

"I found out that you guys just build an amazing mobile app for your e-commerce venture, I heard you are using Symfony 2 for your back-end APIs. How did you make it that fast?" This is not very different that what I was asked some months back. The answer is we use a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) where all back-end service follow the REST architecture to communicate with all the clients. The client can be built in any language as longs a they can do HTTP calls. Lets look at what Symfony 2 bundles you can use to build a similar scalable, fast and cacheable REST APIs.

His suggested bundles (all available to be installed via Composer) are:

• FOSRestBundle
• NelmioApiDocBundle
• LexikJWTAuthenticationBundle

The first two help more with the overall API structure and handling while the last (Lexi) is an effective way for handling authentication for the requests to your application.

In a new post to his site Lukas Smith wonders what's next for Symfony2, the popular PHP framework. Rather than the actual framework, though, he looks at the framework community and wonders where they should direct their attention.

Avid readers of my blog might have noticed a theme in recent blog posts. A while ago I noted that core developers of the early days have become a lot less active. Then I posted about the need to start working on higher level code to make Symfony2 more rapid development friendly. Following this post I blogged about what is missing to make Symfony2 truly great for building REST APIs. Now last evening at DrupalCamp Vienna I was asked what is there left to do for the Symfony2 community and it didn't take me long to think of an answer: Bundles!

He talks about some of the current ecosystem around the framework's major bundles and wonders where people should be focusing. Are there bundles that should be worked on more, building up features and providing a more solid core group of developers (than maybe one or two)?

Lukas Smith has a new post sharing what he sees as a growing trend in the development of PHP applications (a good thing) - the decoupled mindset more developers seem to follow and the use of tools like Composer that help to promote it.

As more and more projects adopt composer they will not only start using 3rd party code, they will also come to realize how easy it is for them to expose their code to 3rd parties. Obviously NIH syndrome will not be purged from the planet and maybe it should never get purged entirely anyway. But its already quite clear how much the landscape of the PHP community is changing with Symfony2, Doctrine, Zend Framework2, TYPO3 and many other projects having adopted composer.

He notes, however, that there still seem to be those clinging to "the old ways" and keeping things tightly bound to the technologies they're designed to work with. He's coming from the point of view of a Symfony2 user, so he gives the examples of some of the Bundles that are out there, reinventing functionality they could have pulled in from 3rd party libraries.