Silex is a PHP microframework based on Symfony2 components.
With the shift in recent years to leveraging more JavaScript and front-end code in fat clients, a lot of server-side processing has been reduced to simple data relay and APIs. As a result, there have been a number of microframeworks arisen, which allow you to serve out content in a really simple and easy way.
One of the most popular is Sinatra, a micro-framework for Ruby, which is what we built Village Chief on. Indeed, Silex is inspired by Sinatra, but is PHP-based and uses some of the great components that can be found in the Symfony2 framework.
As you would expect from a microframework, it’s really easy to get started.
<?php
require_once __DIR__.'/../vendor/autoload.php';
$app = new Silex\Application();
$app->get('/hello/{name}', function ($name) use ($app) {
return 'Hello '.$app->escape($name);
});
$app->run();
It relies heavily on Composer, a PHP dependency manager. This is a bit of a pain if you’re not already using Composer as it means you have to have yet another piece of software on your computer, but unfortunately, you’re somewhat railroaded into it as there is virtually no documentation on how to install things like Twig without it. Luckily, once you have it, it does make things easy and pain-free, so it’s probably worth going through the initial setup.
Once you’re up and running, it’s a snap to add content. We recently re-launched Maze Finance and the entire process of getting Silex up and running and migrating our existing website into it took less than two hours!
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Tags: micro framework, PHP, silex, symfony, symfony2
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2012 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Limited, Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.