Tag / Javascript

by Kévin Dunglas

NPM dependency hell: comparison with Symfony, Laravel and API Platform

You may have noticed the recent fuss about the compromise of event-stream, a popular NPM package:

event-stream is a transitive dependency of many popular JavaScript projects including Vue, Angular, Gatsby and VSCode (some of them are using a version that isn’t affected by the attack).

This attack raised, again, the problem of the JS dependency cascade: when you install a major project, it comes with hundreds of tiny libraries, sometimes not maintained, and sometimes coming from untrusted sources.

Some claimed that the problem wasn’t specific to the JavaScript ecosystem, and that projects in other languages such as Rails and Symfony were also suffering from a similar dependency hell.
A Twitter poll created by Rafael Dohms highlights that most developers believe that it’s only a matter of luck if this issue has affected the JavaScript ecosystem, and not the PHP one:

Regarding Symfony, as a maintainer I have the feeling that the Symfony Core Team (carefully) adds dependencies only when strictly necessary. However I had no metrics to prove it. So I checked. Then I compared with other PHP frameworks I’m interested in: Laravel and API Platform.

Symfony

When installing Symfony 4.1 using the official skeleton, only 20 packages are downloaded (19 when excluding dev dependencies). 16 are directly maintained by the Symfony project, and the 4 others are interfaces from the PHP Framework Interoperability Group:

Even when installing the website skeleton, that comes with all features provided by the framework and third party (trusted) packages such as the Doctrine ORM, the Twig templating library or Swift Mailer, only 94 packages (75 when excluding dev dependencies), from 17 different organisations (14 without dev deps) are installed:

Among these vendors, 7 are directly maintained by members (or former members) of the Symfony Core Team (easycorp, monolog, sensio, swiftmailer, symfony, twig, webmozart) and 2 are from the FIG. All these few libraries, except maybe jdorn/sql-formatter, are actively maintained, by prominent and well known members of the PHP community.

API Platform

A minimal installation of the server part (the one written in PHP) of the API Platform framework contains only 27 packages (26 without dev deps) from 5 vendors.

When installing the API pack, that provides all features you can expect from an advanced web API (hypermedia support, automatic persistence with the Doctrine ORM support, automatic generation of human-readable documentation, CORS support, authorisation rules…), 57 packages (56 without dev deps) from 10 vendors are shipped.

On the other hand, the API Platform distribution comes with (optional) frontend tools: an admin and a Progressive Web Apps and mobile apps generator. They are built-on top of React, so even if the JavaScript libraries directly maintained by the API Platform team depend of just a few carefully selected libraries… these dependencies are typical JavaScript ones, and come with hundreds of dependencies (see after).

Laravel

The default installation of Laravel (that is somewhat similar in term of features to the Symfony website skeleton) comes with 72 packages (39 when excluding dev deps) from 35 vendors (21 when excluding dev deps).

The number of maintainers you have to trust when using Laravel is just a bit larger than when using Symfony, but again it’s still a bunch of people that are well known in the PHP community, and who may fit in a single room.

In comparison, a default installation of React using Create React App – that is more similar to the minimal Symfony skeleton than to fully-featured frameworks such as the Symfony website skeleton or Laravel – comes with 809 packages, most of them being maintained by different teams or individuals.

Another main difference is that most JS libraries are distributed as compiled and minified builds. Therefore it’s very difficult to guarantee that what is shipped and executed behaves exactly the same way than the code in the sources. In PHP, the source of the libraries are used directly, without intermediate obfuscation.  PHP builds are easy to reproduce, it helps a lot when auditing.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that major PHP frameworks are immune to this kind of attacks and – as any IT project – they also have their own security issues. However, the amount of third party code installed and the chain of trust you have to rely on is more under control than in the JS world.

By the way, you’d better actively monitor the security vulnerabilities that may affect your PHP projects.

by Kévin Dunglas

Upcoming conferences and workshops

I’ll speak at several conferences until the end of 2018.

The topics will be varied: Panther, modern JavaScript, HTTP/2 and a brand new project to be announced (teasing: it’s written in Go, and it will be very helpful for serverless architectures!).

See you at:

I’ll also be available to chat, and I’ll carry a lot of API Platform goodies. Don’t hesitate to get in touch!

by Kévin Dunglas

Be paid to improve API Platform during the Rails Girls Summer of Code

(french translation below)

API Platform (the API-driven Open Source framework I created) has been selected for the Rails Girls Summer of Code program!

The goal of the RCSOC is to improve the diversity in Open Source development. It allows groups of 2 women students to work full-time on a FOSS project (such as API Platform) during the summer. Students are paid and mentored.

Rails Girls Summer of Code is a global fellowship program for women and non-binary coders. Students receive a three-month scholarship to work on existing Open Source projects and expand their skill set.

Our worker cooperative, Les-Tilleuls.coop, will also support the program by providing money, coaches (including me) and desktops (in Lille, France):

In our company, we attempt as much as possible to support associations engaged in the fight against social inequalities, or involved in a better access to culture and respect of the environment. Since our foundation in 2011, we have always upheld diversity in Open Source. Thus, it’s no surprise that we support Rails Girls’s Summer of Code program.

If you’re interested in working 3 months with us to improve cutting-edge Open Source projects, don’t by shy, apply!

API Platform, le framework API-driven que nous développons, compte parmi les projets sélectionnés pour le Rails Girls Summer of Code de cette année !

Ce programme vise à favoriser la diversité dans le mode du logiciel libre. Il permet à des groupes de 2 étudiantes d’être payées durant l’été pour travailler (en binôme) sur des projets Open Source.

Notre SCOP Les-Tilleuls.coop participe également au programme en tant que sponsor, et va fournir des bureaux (à Euratechnologies, Lille) et des “coachs” afin d’accompagner les participantes :

Chez Les-Tilleuls.coop, nous tentons autant que possible d’accompagner des associations ou des entités engagées dans la lutte contre les inégalités sociales, l’accès à la culture, la formation, ou encore le respect de l’environnement.  Notre coopérative s’implique aussi dans une meilleure diversité dans le numérique et c’est donc avec une certaine évidence que nous apportons notre soutien au programme “Summer of Code 2018” organisé par l’association Rails Girls (RGSoC).

Si vous êtes intéressées pour travailler 3 mois sur des projets Open Source innovants, ne soyez pas timides, postulez !

by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform 2.2: GraphQL, JSON API, React admin and PWA, Kubernetes instant deployment and many more new features


I’m glad to announce the immediate availability of API Platform 2.2 beta 1. This is a huge release that comes with a lot of exciting features including (but not limited too):

  • GraphQL and JSON API support
  • Symfony 4 / Flex integration
  • API Platform Admin integration (built with ReactJS and Admin On Rest)
  • ReactJS and Vue.js Progressive Web App generators integration (a React Native app generator is also available)
  • Revamped Docker containers for both PHP and JavaScript components, including out of the box support for HTTP2, HTTPS and a built-in invalidation-based cache mechanism using Varnish
  • The ability to deploy in seconds in any Kubernetes cluster
  • A new, super-easy, way to register filters through annotations
  • And literally dozens of developer experience, performance and quality improvements

V2.2 will definitely be the best version of API Platform, and is probably the most advanced “full-stack” solution to create API-driven projects. The paradigm shift introduced by this new version has been detailed in my talk during the SymfonyCon 2017.

It took 6 months and 483 commits from more than 60 contributors to craft this version. The documentation has also been dramatically improved, even if some work is still to do (upgrading the getting started guide and migrating all articles to the new Flex directory structure, finish to document some new features).

Thank you very much to all contributors of the project! You rock!

Let’s see more in depth all of these new features:

The New Distribution

The easiest way to get started with API Platform has always been to use the provided Docker setup. In version 2.2, the Docker configuration has been totally redesigned to fit with the new features provided by Symfony Flex and to integrate our JavaScript components.

To get started:

You get:

– An API skeleton following the Flex directory structure. Just add classes representing your public data model (see the example below) to get a working hypermedia and/or GraphQL web API.

The API is available in HTTP/2 and HTTPS thanks to the provided development proxy. It also automatically benefits from the API Platform’s built-in cache mechanism (the Varnish container is also provided). CORS headers are automatically configured. As you can see, the nice documentation is – of course – still available if you open the entrypoint in a browser.

– A ReactJS Progressive Web App skeleton with a fancy welcome page designed by Laury Sorriaux:

Execute  docker-compose exec client generate-api-platform-client to bootstrap a nice and fully-featured Progressive Web App (that can even work offline) using React, Redux and Bootstrap 4 and respecting accessibility recommendations.

To generate the PWA, the tool parses the API hypermedia description automatically generated in the Hydra format by the API component. This generator can work with any server exposing a Hydra documentation (done with API Platform or not).

The tool also has Vue.js, React Native and TypeScript skeletons thanks to the great contributions of Alain Hippolyte, Piotr Synowiec and Antoine Bluchet.

Read the full documentation of the API Platform Client Generator.

– Last but not least, a dynamically generated admin for the API is also automatically available:

Like the client generator, the API Platform Admin component also leverages the Hydra documentation to automatically guess the structure of the data exposed by the API.

Because it is built on top of React and Admin On Rest (aka React Admin), the UI is fully customizable.

Morgan Auchedé is the new maintainer of this component, and has greatly improved it since its initial release.

– In this version of API Platform, the MySQL container has been replaced by a Postgres one.

Instant Kubernetes Deployment

Kubernetes has become the most popular way to deploy, run and manage containers in production. Both Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services provide managed Kubernetes environment.

API Platform 2.2 contains a built-in Helm (the k8s package manager) chart to deploy with ease:

Your app is now up and running in a managed cluster! Read the related documentation to learn more about the Kubernetes support.

GraphQL Support

GraphQL is a query language for APIs designed by Facebook that is becoming a very popular alternative to the REST pattern. GraphQL support has been the most wanted feature for a while, it is now fully implemented!

The new GraphQL subsystem of API Platform now supports:

To enable the GraphQL support, you just have to install the GraphQL PHP library:

Then, create an API Platform entity, as usual:

Yes, both GraphQL and REST formats can be used for the same entity! Thanks to API Platform’s hypermedia support, you can even run a GraphQL request, then apply REST operations to the retrieved resources using their IRIs! The best of both worlds.

Your GraphQL API is ready! Browse https://localhost:8443/graphql :

There is a lot to say about the GraphQL support, how to use it in collaboration with REST and how to apply fine-grained configurations. I’ll write a follow-up post dedicated to it, stay tuned!

The GraphQL support is an important team work of Raoul Clais, Alan Poulain, Baptiste Meyer and myself.

JSON API Support

JSON API is a rising, well designed, hypermedia format. Unlike JSON-LD (the default format exposed by API Platform), it’s not a web standard; and it has less features but it is also simpler to learn and understand.

With API Platform 2.2, you don’t have to choose, you can have both! And even more because API Platform supports out of the box JSON-LD/Hydra, HAL, JSON API, YAML, XML, raw JSON and as we’ve seen just before, GraphQL.

To enable JSON API, add the following config:

Easy enough?

The JSON API support has been contributed by Hamza Amrouche, Hector Hurtarte and Baptiste Meyer.

Declaring API Filters Using Annotations

The API Platform filtering system is very powerful. It contains a lot of built-in filters and can easily be extended. However, until now, it wasn’t really easy to configure: it was requiring to declare services manually.

Because Symfony Flex is all about service autowiring and autoconfiguration, simplifying the filters configuration was a top priority task.

Hopefully, Antoine Bluchet created a nice way to do it using annotations:

Nothing more! You can now filter the collection of organizations by the name  property, both with REST and GraphQL!

In addition to these main features, a lot of other configuration options and various improvements have been introduced. Read the full changelogs for more information:

Help Us: Test, Star, Spread the Word!

If you have some existing API Platform projects, or if you want to give a try to the framework, please test this new version and report any problem on our GitHub issue tracker!

If you like API Platform, please tell the world and give us a star on GitHub.

Since API Platform 2.2, the Symfony Thanks command is also shipped with API Platform. Thanks to this tool, you can send a star to all the PHP libraries you use in your project (including API Platform) by simply running: docker-compose exec php composer thanks

If you want to learn API Platform, come to one of the workshops organized during these upcoming tech conferences:

by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform Admin 0.2: an admin in 1 minute for your API (React Progressive Web App)

The version 0.2 of the API Platform‘s admin component has just been released!

This nice tool allows to automatically and dynamically build a fully featured administration interface (CRUD, pagination, relations…) for any API supporting the Hydra hypermedia vocabulary (more formats supported soon, see at the end of this article). 0 line of code required!

API Platform Admin is built with React on top of the famous Admin On Rest library as a Progressive Web App.

Let’s discover the bunch of new features that this version brings.

Getting Started

Assuming that you have an API exposing a Hydra documentation, you just have to initialize the following React component to get your admin:

For instance, create a new app with Facebook’s create-react-app, replace the content of src/App.js with the previous snippet and run yarn add @api-platform/admin. You’re done!

If you get an error related to multiple versions of React being loaded, just remove the react and react-dom packages from your project’s package.json and run yarn install again.

If you don’t have a JSON-LD / Hydra API yet, here is the code of the one I’ll use in the following examples. This API has been created using the API Platform’s distribution:

Yes, you just need those two tiny PHP classes to get a hypermedia API. Learn more about the API component by reading the getting started guide. But, really, any API with a Hydra documentation will do the job regardless of the server-side programming language.

Native Support for to-Many Relations

API Platform Admin supports to-one relations since its very first release. However it was mandatory to customize the component used for to-many relations. This isn’t the case anymore. Our API documentation parser gained support for cardinalities and can now extract them if the API documentation includes OWL’s maxCardinality properties.

If no cardinality is provided, the admin will use a to-many widget by default.

Thanks to this new feature, here is how the edition screen of the Person resource looks like this:

The admin is able to guess that the Person resource is related to many Greeting ones and use the appropriate Admin On Rest component.

Detection of More Schema.org’s Types (name, url and email)

API Platform Admin is able to guess the widget to use depending of the type of a resource’s property. It supports:

  • Numbers (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#float and http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#integer ranges)
  • Dates (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#date and http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime ranges)
  • Booleans (http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#boolean range)
  • And of course text fields

In this new release, Admin also supports some types of the popular Schema.org vocabulary:

  • As shown in the previous screenshots (e.g. Greetings select box), if a property has the type http://schema.org/name, this property will be used instead of the ID when displaying this relation
  • If a property has the type http://schema.org/url, the URL will be clickable when displayed in the admin
  • If a property has the type http://schema.org/email, the HTML input will be of type email and a basic validation will occur (this was already working in v0.1)

Support for Read-only Resources

The version 0.1 wasn’t able to deal with read-only resource (no POST nor PUT operation). We have improved the API doc parser to support owl:equivalentClass properties. Now, if the API documentation provide those properties, the admin will be builded even if the resource is read-only (of course in this case you will only be able to browse resources, and not to edit them).

Easier and Deeper Customization

Morgan Auchedé did an excellent work to make the Admin fully and easily customizable. You can now override any generated React component by a custom one, or one from Admin On Rest, or from MUI React. You can just replace (or ad, or remove) a specific input or field. But you can also replace a whole list, a show view, a creation or edition form or a remove button.

Here is an example of full customization, courtesy of Morgan:

Ability to Support Other Formats Such as GraphQL

The parser has been designed to be able to be parse other formats such as a GraphQL schema or Swagger/Open API. The api-doc-parser library provides an intermediate representation that is populated by the specific format parser. It’s this representation that is used by the parser as well as by our React and Vue.js Progressive Web App generator.

It means that when converters from other formats than Hydra to this intermediate representation will be available (Pull Requests welcome), both tools we’ll support those formats. As you may know, the server part of API Platform now supports GraphQL. You can guess which format we’ll implement next in the api-doc-parser!

by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform 2.1 Feature Walkthrough: Create Blazing Fast Hypermedia APIs, Generate JS Apps

Update September 18: API Platform 2.1 has now been released. This blog post has been updated according to the syntax used in the stable version.

 

The new UI of API Platform 2.1

API Platform is a framework designed to make the creation of API-based information systems easier. It provides server-side tooling to create modern hypermedia and Linked Data APIs in just a few minutes. This new version introduces client-side tools to bootstrap Single-Page Applications using ReactJS by consuming the autogenerated documentation of the API.

Six months after the release of API Platform 2, I’m very excited to announce the immediate availability of the first beta of API Platform 2.1!

The changelog is huge, more than 200 commits by dozens of developers have been merged. I think we can say that this release will be great!

Let’s review the most interesting new features. If you just want to try it, the demo has been upgraded to use this new version and you can download it on GitHub.

A ReactJS-based Admin System

API Platform automatically exposes API documentations respecting the Hydra (W3C) and Swagger/Open API open standards. We created a dynamic administration system built on top of the awesome Admin On Rest library that takes advantage of the Hydra format.

Just with this line of code <HydraAdmin entrypoint="https://demo.api-platform.com"/>, you will get the following result:

Replace https://demo.api-platform.com by the URL of any API documented with Hydra and you will get a beautiful material design admin for it with:

  • list, create, show, edit screens as well as a delete button
  • suitable inputs and fields according to the API doc (e.g. number HTML input for numbers, checkbox for booleans, selectbox for relationships…)
  • suitable inputs and fields according to Schema.org types if available (e.g. email field for http://schema.org/email)
  • relationships
  • pagination
  • client-side validation for mandatory fields
  • server-side errors displaying (e.g. advanced validation)

It means that any API Platform API can now have an admin for free! The admin is fully customizable, a follow up post will come.

A React/Redux Webapp Generator

The admin is dynamic, no code generation happens. But sometimes it’s interesting to be able to generate some code to bootstrap a project. It’s exactly what the new api-platform-generate-crud tool does. It parses the Hydra documentation and generates a basic ReactJS webapp with the following features:

  • generation of high-quality ES6 components and files built with React, Redux, React Router and Redux Form including:
    • a list view
    • a show view
    • a creation form
    • an edition form
    • a deletion button
  • generation of the suitable HTML5 input type (number, date…) according to the type of the API property
  • display of the server-side validation errors under the related input (if using API Platform Core)
  • client-side validation (required attributes)
  • the generated HTML is compatible with Bootstrap and includes mandatory classes
  • the generated HTML code is accessible to people with disabilities (ARIA support)
  • the Redux and the React Router configuration is also generated

Thanks to Piotr Synowiec for his contributions and fixes to those frontend tools!

Builtin HTTP Cache Invalidation System

Exposing a hypermedia API has many advantages. One of them is the ability to know exactly which resources are included in HTTP responses created by the API. We used this specificity to make API Platform apps blazing fast.

When the new cache mechanism is enabled, API Platform collects identifiers of every resources included in a given HTTP response (including lists, embedded documents and subresources) and returns them in a special HTTP header called Cache-Tags.

A cache reverse proxy supporting cache tags (Varnish, CloudFlare, Fastly…) must be put in front of the web server and store all responses returned by the API with a high TTL. When a resource is modified, API Platform takes care of purging all responses containing it in the proxy’s cache. It means that after the first request, all subsequent requests will not touch the web server, and will be served instantly from the cache. It also means that the content served will always be fresh, because the cache is purged in real time.

The support for most specific cases such as the invalidation of collections when a document is added or removed or for relationships and inverse relations is built-in.

We also included Varnish in the Docker setup provided with the distribution of API Platform, so this new feature works out of the box.

Integration with Varnish and the Doctrine ORM is shipped with the core library. You can easily implement the support for any other proxy or persistence system.

A big thanks to Jérémy Derussé, Teoh Han Hui, Fabien Bourigault, Antoine Bluchet and all other involved contributors for their in-depth reviews and good advices.

A detailed blogpost about this feature will follow.

Per Resource Authorization Mechanism

Thanks to the API Platform’s events and the extension system, it was already easy to configure basic authorization rules. In the version 2.1, we introduced an easy way to configure fine grained authorization rules directly from resource classes.

In the following example, only the logged in admins can access all operations related to the SecuredResource. However, regular users owning a specific resource can also access it:

Under the hood, this new feature uses Symfony’s access control expressions. The object variable value is the current resource (or collection of resources) while the user variable contains an instance of the Symfony’s user currently logged in.

Subresources Support

Having the ability to expose subresources was one of the most requested features. It was already possible to use such URL patterns thanks to custom operations, but it was a bit complicated to do.

Fortunately Antoine Bluchet rolled up this sleeves and did an excellent job! As of API Platform 2.1, subresources are a first class citizen:

The previous snippet is enough to expose through http://example.com/products/1/reviews  the list of RelatedDummies resources related to the Dummy #1.

The documentations will also reflect the availability of this new URL.

New Filters

API Platform comes with 3 new useful filters that you will love.

property_filter

Baptiste Meyer contributed 2 of them. The first one, api_platform.serializer.property_filter, lets the client specify which properties the API must return.

When a resource is configured to use it, you can use the URL  /products/1?properties[]=price&properties[]=currency to only serialize the properties “foo” and “bar” of this entity (all other properties will be ignored).

It’s also possible to list the properties of embedded resources with the following format:  /products/1?properties[]=price&properties[brand][]=name.

group_filter

The second one, api_platform.serializer.group_filter is similar, but instead of choosing properties one by one, you can pass a list of serialization groups to apply using a URL like:  /products/1?groups[]=detailed.

Those two filters allow to easily reduce the size of the returned resources to only include relevant data.

exists_filter

The last new filter, api_platform.doctrine.orm.exists_filter, was contributed by Teoh Han Hui. It allows to filter a collection on the existence of a specified value:  /products?brand[exists]=0.

A Revamped API Doc UI

API Platform has a nice UI built with Swagger UI that is available for every URL of the API when requesting it from a browser (or any client sending a Accept: text/html HTTP header). In API Platform 2.1, we upgraded Swagger UI to its new major version (3.0), a full rewrite in ReactJS (API Platform + React = ❤️) including a bunch of UX improvements.

Laury Sorriaux took this opportunity to propose a great custom stylesheet improving the overall user experience and respecting our color scheme. It also contains an animation featuring our cute spider (he will get a name soon, stay tuned)!

Last but not least, Daniel Kiesel contributed to improve the integration with OAuth (and FOSOAuthBundle): it’s now possible to login with OAuth from the UI by just adding a few lines of config.

Brand New Docker Setup

One of the coolest features of API Platform 2 was the ability to run the app locally by just typing  docker-compose up  and to deploy apps in a breath with Kubernetes or Docker Swarm.

In API Platform 2.1, we dramatically improved the Docker support:

  • All images are now using Alpine Linux (reduce the size, improve the security)
  • Nginx and PHP-FPM are now used instead of Apache and mod_php
  • Varnish has been added (see the section about the cache invalidation mechanism)
  • The Docker Compose file has been upgraded to the format v3
  • Many compatibility problems with Windows have been fixed
  • The performance when using Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows has been dramatically improved

This Docker setup supports any Symfony-based application. Just copy/paste it in your Symfony project.

Improving the Docker configuration was a hard and collaborative work. I want to especially thanks Jacques Lefebvre, Teoh Han Hui and Antoine Bluchet for the large numbers of hours they spent to make this possible.

Integration in Symfony Flex

You can’t have missed it, Symfony 4 will come with an exciting tool to install and manage your projects: Symfony Flex. API Platform is already officially supported by Flex and can’t be easier to install: just type  composer req api

Fabien Potencier (the creator of Symfony) recorded a screencast showing how API Platform and Flex fit well together:

Impressive isn’t it? Flex only works with API Platform 2.1+. Older versions aren’t supported.

Of course, many other new features, fixes and improvements (especially regarding performance) have been merged, you can read the full changelog to learn more.

Next steps before the stable release:

  • Testing, testing and testing again. Please try the new features, upgrade your existing projects and run your tests suites against this new version! Report any problem on GitHub. It’s very very helpful to us!
  • Update the documentation and write new articles for the new features. They are already many pull requests opened, reviewing and improving them is much appreciated.

A last and big thanks to all the API Platform Core Team and especially to Teoh Han Hui, Antoine Bluchet, Baptiste Meyer and Hamza Amrouche for their detailed work reviewing all contributions and getting this beta out!

P.S.: Spread the word, please give us a star on GitHub or tweet about the release of this new version!

by Kévin Dunglas

API Platform 2.1: when Symfony meets ReactJS (Symfony Live 2017)

Slides and videos of my talk during the Symfony Live Paris 2017. Rate this talk on joind.in!

Learn how to use API Platform and Symfony to create super easily rich web and mobile applications relying on React (JS) for their presentational layer.

In just a few minutes, we will create a hypermedia API thanks to API Platform, Symfony and Doctrine. We will do it step by step, and the API will be 100% functional with support for pagination, validation, filters, resources embedding. The API will be automatically documented using Swagger and Hydra and beautiful user interface for developers will be available. HTTP cache, authorization and authentication can then be added in a breath.

Then, we will introduce all new client-side tools for API Platform:

  • A fully featured JavaScript (Single Page App) administration system with a modern user interface (Material Design) ; built on top of Admin On Rest (React and Redux). This admin is builded dynamically thanks to the API discoverability (Hydra).
  • A raw React, Redux and React Router code generator to bootstrap fully-featured Single Page Applications and native mobile apps thanks to the API documentation exposed by API Platform (client-side and server-side validation, on fields error, Twitter Bootstrap compatibility, a11y support…)
by Kévin Dunglas

DunglasTodoMVCBundle compatible with Symfony 2.4

I’m pleased to announce the release of DunglasTodoMVCBundle 1.1.0.

Screenshot Symfony Todomvc

DunglasTodoMVCBundle is an implementation of TodoMVC, the popular site providing the same todo app implemented in a ton of different JavaScript frameworks.

This bundle provides a REST / JSON API built with Symfony and Doctrine, and an API client built with Chaplin.js and Backbone.js.

In this new release:

Enjoy!

by Kévin Dunglas

DunglasAngularCsrfBundle: protect your Symfony / AngularJS apps against CSRF attacks

I create and I see more and more web applications sharing the same powerful architecture:

 These components share the same philosophy (built on top of dependency injection and MVC-like patterns, designed to be intensively tested) and play very well together.

This stack allows to create awesome blazing-fast web applications. Better, the client part and the server part of the app are loosely coupled, can evolve separately and can even be maintained by different teams.

However, this kind of apps often suffer of security problems, and especially Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF) vulnerabilities.

Both Symfony and AngularJS provide their own CSRF protection mechanisms, but by default they are not interoperable and not enabled. Thanks to a recent refactoring of the Symfony’s security component, it’s now possible and clean to make both systems working together, and I’ve just released an open source bundle to do that: DunglasAngularCsrfBundle.

This bundle provides out of the box CSRF protection for AngularJS apps interacting with a Symfony-backed app.

Despite it’s name, it does not depend of AngularJS and can also be used with Chaplin.js / Backbone.js, jQuery or even raw JavaScript. To do so, install and configure the bundle, then just add to XHR requests a HTTP header called X-XSRF-TOKEN containing the value of the token set by a cookie on the first HTTP request. The bundle will automatically check the validity of the provided token. If it is not valid, an Access Denied error (HTTP 401) will be thrown.

The bundle is fully tested with phpspec and obtain a platinum medal on the brand new (awesome) SensioLabs Insight quality monitoring system.

Internals documentation and installation instructions are provided on the GitHub page of the bundle. Check it, test it, star it and tell me what you think of it!

Download DunglasAngularCsrfBundle on GitHub. 

by Kévin Dunglas

jquery.confirmExit : où comment ne plus perdre les données d’un formulaire complété

Je viens de publier un petit plugin jQuery sous license MIT qui affiche une demande de confirmation lorsqu’un l’utilisateur quitte une page web après avoir rempli un formulaire sans l’avoir envoyé.

Perdre toutes les données que l’on vient de saisir en cliquant sur un lien ou en fermant la fenêtre sans avoir appuyer sur “Envoyer”, c’est le genre de détails qui font rager contre les applications web mal finies.

Plus d’excuse avec jquery.confirmExit. Cerise sur le gâteau, le plugin supporte tous les nouveaux champs de formulaires introduits avec HTML5.

Télécharger le plugin sur GitHub