Once the requirements and wireframes are set, we can focus our attention to the selection of a technology stack. In Chapter 1, Ecosystem Overview we glossed over several of the most popular PHP frameworks, pointing out their strengths. Choosing the right one in this case, is more of a matter of preference, as application requirements for the most part can be easily met by be met any one of those frameworks. Our choice, however, falls to Symfony. Aside from PHP frameworks, we still need a CSS framework to deliver some structure, styling, and responsiveness within the browser on the client side. Since the focus of this book is on PHP technologies, let's just say we chose the Foundation CSS framework for that task.
The Symfony framework makes a nice choice for our application. It is an enterprise level framework that has been around for years, and is extremely well documented and supported. It can be downloaded from the official http://symfony.com page as shown here:
The benefits of using Symfony as part of our technology stack are numerous. The framework provides robust and well documented:
- Controllers
- Routing
- ORM (via Doctrine)
- Forms
- Validation
- Security
These are essential features required by our application. The ORM in particular, plays a major role in rapid application development. Having to worry less about coding, every aspect of CRUD can boost the speed of development by a factor or two. The great thing about Symfony in this regard is that it allows for automatic generation of entities and CRUD actions around them by executing two simple commands such as the following:
php bin/console doctrine:generate:entity php app/console generate:doctrine:crud
By doing so, Symfony generates entity models and necessary controllers that empower us to perform the following operations:
- List all records
- Show one given record identified by its primary key
- Create a new record
- Edit an existing record
- Delete an existing record
Basically, we get a minimal store manager interface for free. This alone covers most of the CRUD related requirements set for the store manager role. We can then easily modify the generated templates to further integrate the remaining functionality.
On top of that, security components provide authentication and authorization that we can use to satisfy the customer and store manager logins. So a store manager will be a fixed, pre-created user attached to Symfony's firewall, the only one having access to CRUD controller actions.
Backed by the company Zurb, the Foundation framework makes a great choice for a modern responsive web application. We might say it is an enterprise level framework, providing a collection of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that we can build upon. It can be downloaded from the official http://foundation.zurb.com page as shown here:
Foundation comes in three flavors:
- Foundation for sites
- Foundation for e-mail
- Foundation for apps
We are interested in the sites version. Aside from general styling, Foundation for sites provides a great deal of controls, navigational elements, containers, media elements, and plugins. These will be particularly useful in our application, for things like header menus, category product listings, responsive cart tables, and so on.
Foundation is built as a mobile-first framework, where we code for small screens first and larger screens then inherit those styles. Its default 12-column grid system enables us to create powerful multi-device layouts quickly and easily.
We will use Foundation simply to provide structure, some basic styling, and responsiveness to our application, without writing a single line of CSS on our own. This alone should make our application visually pleasing enough to work with both on mobile and desktop screens, while still focusing the majority of our coding skills around backend things.
Aside from providing robust functionality, the company behind Foundation also provides premium technical support. Though we will not need it as part of this book, these sorts of things establish confidence when choosing application frameworks.