I was consulting and I would see significant server resources consumed by bootstrapping the apps. Loading config files, loading dependent classes, setting up dependencies, initializing ACL's, and the list goes on and on. One of the ways to negate the effect would be to cache a bootstrap object and then pull that object from the cache at the start of the request. However, the problem is that unserialization can actually end up taking more time than the bootstrap process itself.

He wonders if, after the initial bootstrapping happened, a method could be called (his example is "init_engine_state") that would cache the Zend Engine's current state and pass that to a callback function. This would cache everything - objects, variables, classes, etc - all pre-interpreted into memory and make them easy to reuse on future executions. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments of the post.

Bootstrap is a well known and powerful front-end framework for fast prototyping, it uses LESS and it can be easily integrate in your Symfony applications with the help of assetic. In this post I'll show how to: Install bootstrap in you Symfony application, load it using assetic, and compile bootstrap LESS files with lessphp.

Using Composer, creating a new Symfony2 project is just a single command away. The just update the "composer.json" and run the install to get the other needed libraries (LESS and the Twitter Bootstrap). They help you set up some Assetic filters for LESS and provide a simple page to output the Bootstrap in your header.

They provide the documentation to the methods and I saw they have a simple interface to test their methods: Ooyala API Scratchpad. This interface was very useful while we integrate with them and I thought: "Why we don't have one interface like that for our API?" I started a page with Twitter Bootstrap to have a similar functionality, which the goal was to get an interface easy to developers see the response for multiple HTTP protocols, set the parameters, etc.

The interface uses Javascript to make requests over to a RESTful API and returns the response JSON directly to the page. It's a little bit customized to how their API works, but it's a good foundation for anyone looking to implement something similar. You can get the full code for it over on github.

A brand spanking new Forms component has been rolled out with ZF2. The long and the short of this new component meant that I had the opportunity to hand roll a new way of making my forms work with Twitter Bootstrap. So, a little tinkering, a quick pull request to ZF2 to allow the definition of arbitrary options and I came up with some useful View Helpers that can be dropped into a project and used.

He includes the code for the sample class ("MyForm") and highlights the "bootstrap" portions of each element's configuration and walks you through some other handy features of his helpers: auto-rendering forms, a "row" helper and a "collection" helper to help organize the form structure.

The Bootstrapping process in Zend Framework isn't perfect. You'll often end up bootstrapping a lot of resources that you don't need to complete the request. Depending on the resources this can be really expensive and hurt your overall performance. The worst kind are resources that open connections to external services [...], even worse, if the services are down they will end up blocking the execution.

Using his modified "getResource" and "lazyload" methods, he shows you how to modify your resource requests to put them in a temporary state that is only initialized when the resource is needed. You can find the code for this example in this gist.

Unfortunately the Symfony documentation does not provide any details on how to configure Assetic to use LESS. There is a blog post by Dustin Dobervich that gives some pointers, but after following the instructions, Assetic issued the following error: Cannot find module 'less'. We searched around without much success. After several tries, we nailed the configuration.

It's an easy two-step process: first you be sure you have "npm" (the package manager) installed on your system, then you modify your Symfony app.yml file to point to the Node modules path.

After having had a look at Silex, and struggling with the somewhat cumbersome ini configurations and YADIF, I wanted to try out whether I could use Pimple as DI container for ZF 1.x Turns out I can, as you can just select Pimple to be the bootstrap container.

Hsi example (gist of the code here) also shows how to subclass the container and add in some default settings objects into the container. Pimple is a small, lightweight dependency injection container from Fabien Potencier of the Symfony framework.

Following on from the discussion on modules, we can hook into the event system to do module specific bootstrapping. By this, I mean, if you have some code that you want to run only if the action to be called is within this module, you can hook into the Application's dispatch event to achieve this.

He starts with an example of a basic module (Simple/Module.php) and shows how to define an "onBootstrap" method that calls the "onDispatch" method (when hooked to the event manager) to do some module-specific bootstrap operations. The RouteMatch feature is used to ensure that you're in the right controller/namespace combo to use the module.

I don't know about you, but for me building HTML Forms and styling HTML Forms are maybe the most boring things in web development. It's repetitive and takes a lot of time to do things correctly. That's why tools like Twitter's Bootstrap and PEAR's HTML_QuickForm2 can help with this part of our job. Wouldn't it be nice to have QuickForm2 generate a markup compatible with Bootstrap CSS, so that you could get a nice looking form without to much efforts? Well, that's what I plan to do here.

He starts by creating a simple QuickForm2 form with no renderers attached (no pre-defined styles) and a custom render callback that wraps the items in "div" tags with the correct styles. There's also a custom renderer included for grouping items with additional styling attached.

In a follow up to my popular post on Symfony2, the open source PHP framework we use at OpenSky, I'm providing an easy guide to getting started using Symfony2. This isn't your basic "Hello World", but a practical guide to beginning a project with Symfony2.

He walks you through bootstrapping a sample application, applying a fix those on OSX might need and creating the application using the symfony command line tool to build everything you'll need.