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Drupal 8 with Symfony2

And here, I am set for Drupal 8. But wait ... Symfony2 ?? Now who's this ?? We shouldn't ignore

somebody who meets us on our way, right ? So, let's have a short introduction.

What is Symfony2 ?

symfony.com states that Symfony is a set of PHP Components, a Web Application framework, a

Philosophy, and a Community — all working together in harmony.

I am not a Symfony Developer yet what I understand about it is that Symfony is a PHP framework

build on top of reusable, decoupled and cohesive symfony components which serves a lot of web

applications. Symfony shares some of the concepts of the MVC pattern--such as layer separation

yet it's more of an HTTP framework--it’s a Request/Response framework focusing on returning a

response in an optimized and effective way.

Why Symfony2 in Drupal 8 ?

Pushing Drupal forward

As the momentum of GoPHP5 was not kept, there was a need in Drupal to start embracing the

changes happening in the wider development communities. For an instance, by converting core

code over to easily-lazy-loaded classes, Drupal can actually reduce memory by not bootstrapping

code we don't need. That makes response time faster, which is very critical for any web service.

Now it's about

Why reinvent the wheel ?

This integration pushes Drupalists to "get off the island" and replace the NIH (Not invented Here)

syndrome with PIE/PFE (Proudly Invented Elsewhere/Proudly Found Elsewhere), using well-
tested & maintained projects from outside the Drupal world. (Source)
So Drupal 8 uses some of Symfony's components which are vital to the system, such as the Http

Foundation component that understands HTTP and offers a nice request and response object

used by the other components.

Symfony uses a service container that can be used to efficiently manage services in the

application. This concept is also known as Dependency Injection. Service container is used later

in code to fetch services, lazy-loaded on the fly.

These were few highlights of Symfony with Drupal 8, still there remains a lot about the individual

symfony components which we will keep learning with time.

I'll be back soon with the routing mechanism in Drupal 8, explaining my understanding "from

request to response".

Till then let's keep learning and sharing :)

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