Thanks! Let me explain myself

First of all: thanks everybody for reading the previous parts of this series. Many people posted some interesting comments. I realized quickly that I had to explain myself a bit: why am I writing all of this? Why would you ever want to decouple controllers from the (Symfony2) framework? You probably don’t need to bother anyway, because

The chances of you needing to move controllers to other frameworks is next to none. — Rafael Dohms

Writing PHP code with PHP is not very easy. You are constantly switching between the context of the code that generates the code and the code that is to be generated (see, you lost it already!). Some variables are available in the first context, some in the second, and you will have to pass the right values in the right way. One of the areas in Symfony-land where you will have to do these things is when you extend Twig by hooking into the parser and defining your own tags. A tag for example is the “for” in

Ever since I am using the Symfony Framework (be it version 1 or 2), I tend to describe every other project I’ve done (including those that were built on top of some third party “framework” like Joomla or WordPress) as a “legacy project”. Though this has sometimes felt like treason, I still keep doing it: the quality of applications written using Symfony is usually so much higher in terms of maintainability, security and code cleanliness, that even a project done last year using “only PHP” looks like a mess and seems to be no good software at all. So I feel the strong urge to rebuild everything I have in portfolio (as do many other developers), but “this time, I will do it the right way”.