Klaus Silveira has submitted a project he's been working on to make browsing through git repositories a bit simpler with a local tool - gitlist.

GitList is an elegant and modern web interface for interacting with multiple git repositories. It allows you to browse repositories using your favorite browser, viewing files under different revisions, commit history, diffs. It also generates RSS feeds for each repository, allowing you to stay up-to-date with the latest changes anytime, anywhere. GitList was written in PHP, on top of the Silex microframework and powered by the Twig template engine. This means that GitList is easy to install and easy to customize. Also, the GitList gorgeous interface was made possible due to Bootstrap.

Since it's just a PHP-based application, installing it is as easy as cloning the source to a web-accessible directory and setting up a "config.ini" file with your settings. You can find out more about this project based on the popular Silex microframework on its GitHub page.

Martin Sikora has shared some of his experience with setting up a Silex instance to work with Doctrine2 in a new post to his blog. The popular microframework comes with a built-in Doctrine service provider, so integration isn't overly difficult.

Silex is great for its simplicity, however for larger projects you probably want to use some ORM like Doctrine but there's build-in service provider only for Doctrine DBAL and not ORM.

He breaks it up into five smaller steps, each with code samples to help clarify:

• Doctrine 2 ORM Service Provider
• Create your entity classes
• Mind Doctrine DBAL and Doctrine ORM versions
• Doctrine CLI
• Working with Doctrine ORM

Stefan Koopmanschap has a quick new post to his blog with a handy tip for Composer and Cilex/Silex users when dealing with custom namespaces.

For a new proof of concept application I'm building, I need both a simple web interface as well as some commandline tools. I decided to use Silex for the web interface and Cilex for the CLI tools, and opted for using Composer for installing these dependencies into my project. I ran into some issues with the custom project libraries I was building for this application however. Registering my custom namespace into Silex and Cilex didn't result in the classes being loaded for some reason. Composer helped me out though.

His solution involves letting Composer be the default autoloader for the application via an "autoloader" configuration option in the "composer.json" (that can also take a classmap option if you're not PSR-0 compliant, see here).

Josh Adell has posted a quick start guide to getting your application up and running on the PHPFog PHP platform as a service offering.

Being it was Christmas and all, I decided to give myself a present and sign up. I was very surprised by how easy it was to get up and running. I managed to build a simple "echo" service in about i.8 minutes, following roughly these steps.

It was as simple as "launching" a new custom application, waiting for it to become available, cloning the git repository and setting up a simple app. In his case , it's a basic Silex-based app that makes a simple site to greet users with a "Hello world" message. Throw in a basic .htaccess file and the app is all set to push.

In a recent post to his blog Christian Schaefer shows how to use the Goutte tool (a web scraper) to pull information from one site and use it in another Silex-powered one. His tutorial uses a custom service provider for the integration.

Since I discovered the free Facebook App hosting by heroku I keep wanting to make something useful out of it. So I thought about a small service app. Without going into details yet about its nature there was one immediate problem to be solved. How to get hold of the data? So I thought to scrape it off some website. I know this isn't very nice but unfortunately there is no feed I can use.. And how to best scrape a website? Use Goutte!

All you'll need is two things - the goutte.phar and Silex phar files. The code for the service provider is a simple registration of namespaces. With that integrated, it's as simple as making a client object and calling it with a URL.

Ade Slade has written up a quick new post to his blog today showing how you can use the lightweight Silex framework to link your login with Twitter and validate users from their API.

For those not acquainted with Silex: Silex is a PHP microframework for PHP 5.3 A microframework provides the guts for building simple single-file apps. It's awesome. For the example, I've setup a virtual host of example.local on my development machine.

He includes the contents of the .htaccess you'll need to get the rewrite to work for Silex, a link to the OAuth extension you'll need to install for PHP and the code to make the login and auth routes. You'll need to create a Twitter application for your site to get the OAuth secret key to make the authentication work. You can see the complete code here.

Sasa Stamenkovic has a quick post to his blog talking about a switch he made away from the Zend Framework over to Silex for a simple portfolio site.

Last week I needed a small website. I wanted it to be quick and dirty. Well, blazing fast and not so dirty. I heard best about Silex, so I gave it a shot. It was more then good experience. It worked like a charm, it was fun to use and site was completed in one day.

He includes two code snippets - one is the basic "hello world" example that most Silex tutorials reference and the other is more specific to his site. It defines the routes and the (Twig) templates they relate to. A few submodules helped him get this and other functionality working (like the Forms component and Swiftmailer for a contact form). You can find the full source for the site over on github.

On the Box UK site there's a recent post where they "unbox" Silex the recent micro-framework release from Fabien Potencier and the Symfony community. They test things out by creating a sample application, a simple feedback form.

"Silex is a PHP micro-framework for PHP 5.3. It is built on the shoulders of Symfony2 and Pimple and also inspired by sinatra." - description from the Silex website. It allows you to pick and choose what components of Symfony2 you want to use. [...] Like Ruby's Sinatra, it provides a way to get web apps up and running with minimal effort and very little boilerplate code.

He talks about the "installation" process (downloading the phar and dropping it into a directory) and includes code snippets of the parts of his application - the basic routing, twig templates and a POST handler for the form submission.

In a new post to the Liip blog Benoît Pointet talks about his experience with Silex, the micro-framework from Fabien Potencier and the Symfony crowd.

In a recent project, my team needed a micro backend for a small educational simulation game which was mostly client-side code. [...] There were so little backend tasks involved that the primary discussion lead to a 'no framework' approach. But after a great presentation by Igor Wiedler at Liip Zurich, we decided to use the Silex PHP micro-framework for our minimal backend needs.

His application ended up being 200 lines of code (with commenting and space) and made use of Doctrine and templating extensions for the framework.

It was fun, fast and allowed us to concentrate on the real challenges of the project.

For more information on Silex, see silex-project.org.