Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that Doctrine is the most frequently used ORM in the Symfony ecosystem. That’s why for the PHP developer, the mastery of this library is really important. In this article, I propose to look ‘under the hood’ of this Mustang among ORMs and figure out what abstractions and patterns form the base of this library.

In PhpStorm, there is a possibility to create Run/Debug Configurations and to run them from IDE. It allows the project participants to share common configurations using a ‘Shared’ flag in the settings. One of such operations is running unit tests in the course of development. Let’s discuss how to fine-tune this process by means of Docker.

Today, one may often come across the disputes about the feasibility of applying PHP in the development of IT products and services. There are so many publications (mostly, written in emotions by frustrated programmers) stressing out the drawbacks and limitations of PHP and its frameworks, that, as a business owner or a CIO, you may also start hesitating if PHP is suitable for your project. Is the situation really so bad? And if so, why 83 % of all web services are still being written in PHP? And why is it the choice of Slack, BlaBlaCar, Spotify, and other market leaders?

Initially built for server-side scripting, PHP has become one of the most widely used programming languages. According to WWW Technology Surveys, the share of its use worldwide exceeds 80%. Among PHP advocates are such giants as Slack, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Pinterest, Nvidia, Tumblr and, to some extent, Facebook. The wide range of functions it possesses allow applying this language in almost any area of IT development. That's why companies, from startups to large enterprises, so often choose this programming language when it comes to developing products and services. Let’s have a look at some inspiring examples of what can be done with PHP.

What Swiss government database, Vogue France and National Geographic Traveler Netherlands have in common? They are all powered by Symfony2! In this article we are going to tell you about the most high-load websites that are using this highly productive PHP framework and share our own experience with this kind of projects.

Why do we need comments in code? How to write them? Where they are necessary and where they are not? How to comment code correctly? How to create the same documentation style for all members of the team? What are the tools for documentation generation? I will try to answer all the questions and share with you my ideas about this question.

Since its release date, Symfony 2.0 installation process and tools required for it have been changed and updated for several times. In this article we tell you how to install and set up a Symfony2 application.

I have been trying to write this Doctrine 2 ORM tutorial for a long time but just couldn’t get down to it. Finally, I pulled myself together and did it. So here I’m sharing some techniques for working with Doctrine2 ORM which will help to improve the site performance on Symfony2 (precisely any site that uses Doctrine2 ORM). I have created a project and put it on a GitHub as a visual guide so anyone can test my words in action now.

PHP refactoring is really cool! But in the process of fulfilling it, some routine operations and repetitive actions with the code are rather frequent. And in the end there still may remain a lot of syntax errors. Well it often kills any initiative. And surely this is not cool. Fortunately, modern IDE are able to take part of the tasks for themselves while the developer can concentrate on the process of refactoring of code and architecture as a whole, rather than on the fight against boring code.

Most developers spend the lion's share of their time in the development environment. But few use at least half of the opportunities that exist in the IDE, thus making a part of their work boring, monotonous, slow... No, it's not our way! We should use our main working tool to the full force, to squeeze the most out of it, and to move all the most uninteresting, repetitive actions to the shoulders of the program.