Friday: a long day of trying to compose with Symfony

I get the point of things like symfony etc, but for all the guff about them making things east the developers of these things really don’t.

Ok so some things are helped like being able to install components, but removing the ability to use any php in a template seems questionable to me.

A bigger issue for me though is how everything becomes separate and distant. You seem to have to produce separate sets of templates for each db table you might want to interact with. I like to be able to pass a db query to a connection hand the resulting array to a class and receive the results which I can then do something with or just output.

I had a dig around in the database docs and found some info on using joins in statements. The notes were self congratulatory saying something about not needing to type the ’left’ as the clever query rewriting engine takes care of it for you. At this point I’m starting to think that this project was started by someone into code, but not data.

For me everything starts will data. All web apps - all apps are ways of receiving, processing and delivering data. As soon as I see a system which regards data as just another component or optional, I wonder.

Shared code bases / frameworks offer ways to collaborate on projects and benefit from gangs of supporters to review, test and fix things. They spawn their own ecosystems and end up listed by HR bods as nice to haves.

But I feel they can be prone to bloating. To me, a good code day is one where you end up with less code than when you started and things have got easier.

Some people I know would say that PHP itself is a bit fat, and throwing a fatter layer on top seems illogical. Maybe I should just stick typomania on GitHub. Nah.

I seem to have broken my phone’s browser. I thought I’d try to post an image on this page directly by taking a pic using the camera. The images is there, sideways, but the address bar has gone weird.