Happy New Year, 2013, its finally here … Well in 2012, I should say I had Symfony 2 envy, almost akin to a high school crush, so after suffering in silence for so long I have finally decided to jump in with both feet.
I am developing a simple website which is esentially a set of utilities for my home country Uganda, and the idea is that I can learn a bit more advanced PHP but also opensource it later to use as a teaching tool for other local developers (oh yes, I want to share my knowledge too). This will also give me the chance to see if I still got it in me because I do not touch code in my day job, akin to Neo in the matrix hacker by night.
So what I have I used, well an evaluation copy of Zend Studio 9 (used to use an older version at my work place), Symfony 2 (latest distribution), Twitter Bootstrap, JQuery, Git (I am using a private Bitbucket repo) and well an open Google tab. My first words are wow!! Alot has changed in the world of PHP since I last used it, Composer, Less, Sass which requires Ruby … But hey here goes
BTW I am running all this through a WAMP (http://www.wampserver.com/en/) install again the fastest I could get things to work, you could use XAMPP too but I have never done so. I am using PHP 5.3.13 with MySQL 5.5 on Windows 7 64bit. One question I may receive: As a newbie why are you going for the whole enchilada (Symfony2, Composer, Bootstrap Integration etc) - since this is a clean break I am trying to also get an understanding of the different tools that have been developed, how to use them and what they mean for the “average” web developer to answer the question - are they worth it?
Now the initial installation is done, I have my Symfony2 project running with Twitter Bootstrap integrated, it has been about 10 hours of work, but totally worth it as a learning experience