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TLDR; I abandoned Sympera and Symfony 4 because of the complexity of their container. I chose to combine components from The PHP League instead. So with a few enhancements and an Application class wrapper, a framework was born.

Okay, so I have ditched Sympera. The real problem was Symphony’s Container, it didn’t behave in a way I needed it to. Well, at least not that I could find looking through their documentation or by looking through the source. And after a little looking around, I stumbled upon The PHP League and their Container.

Arrow

Introducing Arrow! It has been developed with the Router and Container from The PHP League at it’s heart. Currently still in very early stages it is setup as a composer package, but is not available from packagist yet, but can be loaded by adding a custom composer repository. To find out more information jump over to Arrow’s page.

Progress

With Arrow up and running, we have now made some progress on beginning the application. It is responding to routes, loading modules, and serving content. There are still a few design decisions which I would like to work through first before really starting development, such as how Client/Server side will be split yet work together.

Next Steps

Hopefully with the next update, there will be a simple UI, API, and DB integration, the beginning of the app. Additionally: I am considering using a non-relational DB to learn that technology.

Update 2018-04-04: I decided not to go with Symfony 4. See my update here.

Quick update to this point: Docker is now working and serving a requests to the browser. There is still more to do before this is the ideal setup, but it works.

Silex

So, originally the plan was to use the Silex framework for this project. It is built on the Symfony framework and has plenty of documentation and support. All was good until I discovered Symfony is no longer going to support Silex. Which is disappointing because I love Symfony, but more importantly, I loved that I didn’t have to write the frameowrk.

So, enter Symfony 4. First impressions are good. It’s slimmer, lighter, presumably faster, and has the same great documentation. However, given the changes made to the components and the updated application flow, existing Symfony 3 based frameworks would not be ported to Symfony 4 (any time soon). So I decided to start my own.

Sympera

Introducing Sympera - A Symfony 4 Framework, originally developed right here for Supportik. Right now it is committed directly into the Supportik project, but eventually will be spawned off into it’s own Composer Package.

Keep an eye on these blogs to see the progress of Sympera as well as Supportik.

Hello you! My name is Chris Pennycuick, and I am the original author of this project.

I have been thinking about doing an open-source help-desk SaaS application for a while with a strong focus on enabling external integrations. So I decided to just sit down and push out as much as I can in my downtime to get the ball rolling.

The name “Supportik” is an amalgamation of “Support” and “Ticket”. Not that original, but I think it’s kinda catchy. It may even develop into a verb “Supportik it” - but I doubt it… oh well.

Right now everything is still in planning phase and I am still deciding on some things which cover all aspects of the project. I aim to use the most supported new libraries and patterns. I am working right now to document the environment setup for developers to allow/encourage contributions from as early as possible. I’ll post another update once I have locked a few more things down.

PS. The dream is that this idea/hobby/project turns into something more … but isn’t that every developers dream - for their hobby project to turn into their own profitable business. Well, maybe one day… and if you are a significant contributor, I may just invite you to come with me.