Inside Out » Symfony

User friendly exception handling with symfony

Alvaro — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:27:41 +0000

The default behavior in symfony is that if an exception arises and is not handled then it will redirect the user to the error500.php page or show a stack trace. Even if is possible to override the error500.php page, we were in the need to provide custom messages to the user and also keep him inside the symfony application.

Multiple factors can make this problem to happen, like when the database server refuse our connection attempts or just because something went wrong in our php application. To overcome this issue we developed a plugin that tells the symfony exception handling mechanism to forward the user to a module/action specified in the configuration files.

In this way, we can keep with us all the benefits of the symfony rendering engine, all it’s helpers, etc.

The handler is made in such a way that we can specify a global default error action, or more detailed per module/action handlers. We can have all this coolness by just typing a few lines in the module.yml file or in the app.yml file :).

If you want to see the details of the usage please check the plugin page on the symfony website.

Database Load Balancing with Propel 1.2

Alvaro — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:27:22 +0000

For one of our projects we have load balanced database servers. We needed to have a way to reflect that in our project code which is written using symfony 1.0. The problem was that symfony 1.0 came by default with Propel 1.2, so our database code was targeted to that version of Propel -version 1.3 supports loadbalancing out of the box-.

For the development environment this represented no problem, but when we faced the deployment to production we needed a way to support loadbalancing with Propel 1.2. After some research we decided to create our own loadbalancer plugin for symfony.

We have been testing it live and is performing good so far.

The good news is that we released the plugin as open source so you can go and get it from the symfony website. There we provided a README with the instructions to set up the plugin.

As for the inner workings of the plugin, what it does is override the symfony default Peer builder to add the loadbalance support. Then the database connection for the slaves are specified in the normal database.yml file, so there is no learning curve on the usage of the plugin.

If you want more details on the implementation just drop a line on the comments and we can write a small tutorial about it.

Support to FireSymfony

Boby Seilles — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 06:13:05 +0000

One of our developers, Alvaro Videla, released a few weeks ago a Firebug/Symfony extension: FireSymfony. This allows developers to see their Symfony debug toolbar as an Firebug extension, which leaves the page layout unchanged and also brings more UI improvement. This being quite useful for us at the office.

Our support to this extension is part of our company culture; we encourage people to participate and innovate for the company or the community. We will provide resources to Alvaro like design for the plugin and the blog, hosting for the site and time during business hours where he can work on documentation, bug fixing and new features.

Good luck little plugin!