Symphony.

Hi all,

I’m a fan of symphony since I found it. But I mostly can’t use it on my projects since they are very unique and adapt symphony is harder to do as using other stuff like CodeIgniter.

I have found some others XML/XSLT friendly web frameworks, almost all from the last year and 2008. The one I’m using right now is nexista.org; but is not so good (read almost zero documentation).

Have you found other Web Frameworks that also use XML/XSLT? and if yes… What’s your favorite and why?

Looking forward to your replies. Thanks in advanced

@tank6b - You’ll find Symphony quite flexible and able to adapt to different types of projects. What are you looking to do in Symphony? Would you mind giving us an idea of what your projects are? Also, if you’re on an Apache or Litespeed server running PHP 5.2 with libXML and --with-xsl enabled in your PHP, you will definitely be able to run Symphony on your server.

I know of another CMS that uses XML/XSLT but I’m not sure about what makes an XML/XSLT framework.

EXSLT might be something like what you are looking for. I find XSLT to be a lot like CSS, so a framework using it will mostly be a set of utilities or snippets of functionality.

My favorite CMS that uses XSLT is Symphony. It’s flexible enough to do just about anything.

I usually try not to give non-solution responses, but I have not found much. Sometimes I wish Symphony was less CMS-like and more of a framework, but it’s pretty close.

Actually my projects (mainly the current one) will involve getting data from custom mysql tables, membership, lots of javascript and ajax.

I can run Symphony on my development and production servers, that’s not the issue.

That’s why I’m looking for a web framework where I can use XML/XSLT.

On a current project I’m using an controller object-to-XML serialising layer on the Zend MVC framework (inspired by this). It spits out Symphony-like XML from a controller and means I can write my views in XSLT. I still dislike Zend though.

I dislike Zend too.

I was using Nexista since I run into some issues and the lack of documentation don’t let me go further. But nexista have almost everything I need, including cache, mysql abstraction, etc.

I’m still looking for other framework but the most of them are in a very early stage.

Have you found other Web Frameworks that also use XML/XSLT? and if yes… What’s your favorite and why?

Banshee uses XSLT for views. I don't have much experience of using frameworks like that myself and haven't tried it yet.

I just came across SillySmart for the first time, too. Via Why Use XSLT in Server Side Web Frameworks For Output Generation?

I don't think I'll be jumping to any other framework any time soon as the kinds of projects I'm responsible for fit nicely with Symphony CMS, but it's interesting to see XSLT used in moderately recently updated projects.

Even though it has become a bit controversial to bring up Laravel here, our very own @iwyg has written an XSLT bridge for it that simply consumes and transforms the Laravel-dataobjects to XML and lets you use XSLT in the templating layer afterwards.

Is there a tutorial as to how to implement this bridge? Or does it work out of the box when you include it? Is it the same convention as including a twig style view?

It works out of the box, just name your template file.xsl.

Will give this a try as well, I assume file.xsl would be matching the view you're outputting.

It would be interesting if I could use the XSL in a way Brendo had suggested for Symphony using the sections & modes, however use Laravel models instead.

Thanks Nils, got it. Works like a charm. adding your own default params array into the config is working sweet!.