That Podcast, with hosts and PHP community members Beau Simensen and Dave Marshall, have posted their latest episode (#47): The One Where Silex Is Dead

In this new show Beau and Dave are joined by guest Kevin Boyd to talk about the death of the previously popular Silex framework and how it is being sunsetted by the release of Symfony 4 and Flex. Other topics mentioned include:

• the migration of the popular OpenCFP platform to Symfony 4
• a link to a migration guide for moving from Silex to Symfony 4
• the Silex-inspired framework Cilex
• and a game called Universal Paperclips

You can listen to this latest episode either using the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed and follow them on Twitter to get updates when new shows are released.

On his site Oscar Merida has shared a post showing how to create a ZIP file and stream the response in a Silex-based application using the DOMPDF library and PHP's ZipArchive functionality.

Creating a zip file is easy and Rob Allen has you covered on that front to get you started. I needed to do this to create a zip file of PDF files generated by Dompdf. It turns out, you can add files to a ZipArchive object without actually creating the file if you can get the contents as a string.

The post includes the code to create the DOMPDF instance, load the HTML and render the result. From there the ZipArchive takes over and creates the archive from the PDF result. Finally the code takes the ZIP archive as input and pushes it out with a custom header to tell the browser to download it and streams back the raw ZIP contents.

On his site Oscar Merida has shared a post showing how to create a ZIP file and stream the response in a Silex-based application using the DOMPDF library and PHP's ZipArchive functionality.

Creating a zip file is easy and Rob Allen has you covered on that front to get you started. I needed to do this to create a zip file of PDF files generated by Dompdf. It turns out, you can add files to a ZipArchive object without actually creating the file if you can get the contents as a string.

The post includes the code to create the DOMPDF instance, load the HTML and render the result. From there the ZipArchive takes over and creates the archive from the PDF result. Finally the code takes the ZIP archive as input and pushes it out with a custom header to tell the browser to download it and streams back the raw ZIP contents.

On the Symfony blog there's a quick post from Fabien Potencier (a sort of follow-up to this one) that talks about the end of Silex, a popular Symfony-based microframework, now that Symfony 4 and Flex exist.

What about Silex in a Symfony 4 world? During the last few months, and as an exercise when working on Flex, I have migrated several applications from Silex to Symfony 4. And the conclusion is that Symfony 4 feels like using Silex.

Using Symfony 4 and Flex feels as lightweight as using Silex. [...] Moving away from Silex is also made simpler as Symfony 4 almost auto-configure all your services. [...] For all these reasons, I would say that Silex is not needed anymore. So, we've decided to not support Symfony 4 in Silex, or at least not add the new features added in 3.4.

The comments on the post seem mostly supportive of the decision, realizing that what Symfony 4/Flex bring to the table all but replaces Silex anyway. A migration guide is in the works but hasn't been completed yet at the time of this posting (see this issue for the latest updates on that guide).

On his Medium.com site Peter Lafferty shares a method he uses for test-driven development on Silex controllers, something made difficult by the way the dependencies are injected into the controllers automatically.

“TDD it’s so easy” that’s what they tell us. There’s not trick to it, it’s just a simple trick. This article shows one way to unit test Silex controllers.

The way to implement TDD on a Silex controller is composition, low coupling and dependency injection. At its most basic a Silex controller has no relationship to Silex. However its easy to end up with controllers tightly coupled to the Application and Request classes.

He talks about the two main issues around effective TDD with Silex: the way the dependency injection controller is injected automatically and how the controller "resolver" enforces certain method names. He's figured out tricks to help get around these issues, though. The first involves creating the controller as a service and the second is to only pass the parts of the request the method needs. He includes code showing this in action to help clarify his points.

On his Medium blog Peter Lafferty has written up a post showing you a method for HTTP request validation in Silex, the microframework from the creators of Symfony.

This article covers three validation scenarios: routes, query strings [and] POST with a JSON body.

He starts with a simple Silex application that creates a "RESTful" API with endpoints providing emojis back when queried (three endpoints). He then uses this to show how to validate:

• routes for their expected values in the URL
• using a ValidatorService provider to build a set of assertions (GET request)
• using the same service to create assertions for the JSON content of a POST request

All code required is included in the post including the correct handling of the emoji output via a UTF-8 JSON response handler.

In a new post to his site Gonzalo Ayuso talks about the Silex project (a Symfony-based microframework) and how it just might be dead.

The last week was deSymfony conference in Castellón (Spain). IMHO deSymfony is the best conference I’ve ever attended. [...] This year I cannot join to the conference. It was a pity. A lot of good friends there. So I only can follow the buzz in Twitter, read the published slides (thanks Raul) and wait for the talk videos in youtube.

In my Twitter timeline especially two tweets get my attention. One tweet was from Julieta Cuadrado and another one from Asier Marqués. [...] Tweets are in Spanish but the translation is clear: Javier Eguiluz (Symfony Core Team member and co-organizer of the conference) said in his talk: “Silex is dead”.

He goes on to talk about how, despite the overly dramatic title, the Silex project isn't really "dead" but does have an uncertain future. He talks some about the next version of Symfony - Symfony 4 - and how, because if the changes since v3, it could essentially replace most of what Silex offers. Unfortunately, this also leads to another problem - Symfony 4 isn't ready and if Silex will be deprecated which should he choose for new projects? After some investigation, he decided that Lumen, a Laravel-based microframework, was just right for his needs.

Gonzalo Ayuso has a new post to his site sharing some of the results of his work combining Docker, Silex, Python, Node and WebSockets, discovering how to create a complete platform with these tools.

I’m learning Docker. In this post I want to share a little experiment that I have done. I know the code looks like over-engineering but it’s just an excuse to build something with docker and containers. Let me explain it a little bit.

The idea is build a Time clock in the browser. [...] Yes I know. We can do it only with js, css and html but we want to hack a little bit more. The idea is to create: a Silex/PHP frontend, a WebSocket server with socket.io/node [and a] Python script to obtain the current time.

He then starts in on the code, first creating the WebSocket server in Node then the Python script that makes an internal request to get the time and return it. Then the Silex route is created to serve up the template for the page and the code it uses to connect back to the websocket. The post ends with the Docker configuration he used to create the Docker environment all of this lives in.

On the CloudWays blog they've posted a tutorial that introduces you to the Silex framework, a product from SensioLabs of Symfony fame and using it on a cloud hosting platform (their own).

Extensibility is one of the main aims of web app development projects. However, there are times when you need to get things up and running as soon as possible and with minimum time dedicated to coding. This is where micro-framework s really outshine the competition. There is a long list of these frameworks including Silex, Slim, Lumen, etc. These are ideal for developing small-scale applications with clean code and user defined directory structures.

In this tutorial I am going to explain how to install Silex, its operation, directory structure, Routings and HTTP Requests. Silex is a micro-framework written in Symfony and inspired by Sinatra, a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.

They start by helping you get the CloudWays instance up and running with their "PHPStack" setup. Once created they show how to get to a command prompt, make the public HTML directory and use Composer to install Silex and Twig (for templating). The tutorial then briefly covers the directory structure for the site and the code to create the Silex application instance. They define some of the basic routing (to work with book data) and show the handling for sending feedback submitted via a simple page. The remainder of the tutorial shows the use of different features of Silex including: providers, middleware, before/after handlers and defining controllers as classes.

In a post to his site Gonzalo Ayuso shows you how to combine authentication between Socket.io and a PHP frontend running a simple Silex-based application.

Normally, when I work with websockets, my stack is a socket.io server and a Silex frontend. Protect a PHP frontend with one kind of authentication of another is pretty straightforward. But if we want to use websockets, we need to set up another server and if we protect our frontend we need to protect our websocket server too.

If our frontend is node too (express for example), sharing authentication is more easy but at this time we we want to use two different servers (a node server and a PHP server). I’ve written about it too but today we`ll see another solution.

He sets up a simple Silex application with three routes - the root (/), a login route and a "private" one requiring a user to be logged in. This last route makes the connection to the websocket server in the template. This connection sends the current session ID to the backend where it's verified with a simple Socket.io middleware. Sometimes the session ID cookie will be set as HttpOnly so he provides an alternative for that: a new endpoint just for getting the current session ID for the websocket request.