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Create your own framework... on top of the Symfony2 Components (part 10)
========================================================================

In the conclusion of the second part of this series, I've talked about one
great benefit of using the Symfony2 components: the *interoperability* between
all frameworks and applications using them. Let's do a big step towards this
goal by making our framework implement ``HttpKernelInterface``::

namespace Symfony\Component\HttpKernel;

interface HttpKernelInterface
{
/**
* @return Response A Response instance
*/
function handle(Request $request, $type = self::MASTER_REQUEST, $catch = true);
}

``HttpKernelInterface`` is probably the most important piece of code in the
HttpKernel component, no kidding. Frameworks and applications that implement
this interface are fully interoperable. Moreover, a lot of great features will
come with it for free.

Update your framework so that it implements this interface::

<?php

// example.com/src/Framework.php

// ...

use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpKernelInterface;

class Framework implements HttpKernelInterface
{
// ...

public function handle(Request $request, $type = HttpKernelInterface::MASTER_REQUEST, $catch = true)
{
// ...
}
}

Even if this change looks trivial, it brings us a lot! Let's talk about one of
the most impressive one: transparent `HTTP caching`_ support.

The ``HttpCache`` class implements a fully-featured reverse proxy, written in
PHP; it implements ``HttpKernelInterface`` and wraps another
``HttpKernelInterface`` instance::

// example.com/web/front.php

use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpCache\HttpCache;
use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpCache\Store;

$framework = new Simplex\Framework($dispatcher, $matcher, $resolver);
$framework = new HttpCache($framework, new Store(__DIR__.'/../cache'));

$framework->handle($request)->send();

That's all it takes to add HTTP caching support to our framework. Isn't it
amazing?

Configuring the cache needs to be done via HTTP cache headers. For instance,
to cache a response for 10 seconds, use the ``Response::setTtl()`` method::

// example.com/src/Calendar/Controller/LeapYearController.php

public function indexAction(Request $request, $year)
{
$leapyear = new LeapYear();
if ($leapyear->isLeapYear($year)) {
$response = new Response('Yep, this is a leap year!');
} else {
$response = new Response('Nope, this is not a leap year.');
}

$response->setTtl(10);

return $response;
}

.. tip::

If, like me, you are running your framework from the command line by
simulating requests (``Request::create('/is_leap_year/2012')``), you can
easily debug Response instances by dumping their string representation
(``echo $response;``) as it displays all headers as well as the response
content.

To validate that it works correctly, add a random number to the response
content and check that the number only changes every 10 seconds::

$response = new Response('Yep, this is a leap year! '.rand());

.. note::

When deploying to your production environment, keep using the Symfony2
reverse proxy (great for shared hosting) or even better, switch to a more
efficient reverse proxy like `Varnish`_.

Using HTTP cache headers to manage your application cache is very powerful and
allows you to finely tuned your caching strategy as you can use both the
expiration and the validation models of the HTTP specification. If you are not
comfortable with these concepts, I highly recommend you to read the `HTTP
caching`_ chapter of the Symfony2 documentation.

The Response class contains many other methods that let's you configure the
HTTP cache very easily. One of the most powerful is ``setCache()`` as it
abstracts the most frequently used caching strategies into one simple array::

$date = date_create_from_format('Y-m-d H:i:s', '2005-10-15 10:00:00');

$response->setCache(array(
'public' => true,
'etag' => 'abcde',
'last_modified' => $date,
'max_age' => 10,
's_maxage' => 10,
));

// it is equivalent to the following code
$response->setPublic();
$response->setEtag('abcde');
$response->setLastModified($date);
$response->setMaxAge(10);
$response->setSharedMaxAge(10);

When using the validation model, the ``isNotModified()`` method allows you to
easily cut on the response time by short-circuiting the response generation as
early as possible::

$response->setETag('whatever_you_compute_as_an_etag');

if ($response->isNotModified($request)) {
return $response;
}
$response->setContent('The computed content of the response');

return $response;

Using HTTP caching is great, but what if you cannot cache the whole page? What
if you can cache everything but some sidebar that is more dynamic that the
rest of the content? Edge Side Includes (`ESI`_) to the rescue! Instead of
generating the whole content in one go, ESI allows you to mark a region of a
page as being the content of a sub-request call::

This is the content of your page

Is 2012 a leap year? <esi:include src="/leapyear/2012" />

Some other content

For ESI tags to be supported by HttpCache, you need to pass it an instance of
the ``ESI`` class. The ``ESI`` class automatically parses ESI tags and makes
sub-requests to convert them to their proper content::

use Symfony\Component\HttpKernel\HttpCache\ESI;

$framework = new HttpCache($framework, new Store(__DIR__.'/../cache'), new ESI());

.. note::

For ESI to work, you need to use a reverse proxy that supports it like the
Symfony2 implementation. `Varnish`_ is the best alternative and it is
Open-Source.

When using complex HTTP caching strategies and/or many ESI include tags, it
can be hard to understand why and when a resource should be cached or not. To
ease debugging, you can enable the debug mode::

$framework = new HttpCache($framework, new Store(__DIR__.'/../cache'), new ESI(), array('debug' => true));

The debug mode adds a ``X-Symfony-Cache`` header to each response that
describes what the cache layer did:

.. code-block:: text
X-Symfony-Cache: GET /is_leap_year/2012: stale, invalid, store
X-Symfony-Cache: GET /is_leap_year/2012: fresh
HttpCache has many some features like support for the
``stale-while-revalidate`` and ``stale-if-error`` HTTP Cache-Control
extensions as defined in RFC 5861.

With the addition of a single interface, our framework can now benefit from
the many features built into the HttpKernel component; HTTP caching being just
one of them but an important one as it can make your applications fly!

.. _`HTTP caching`: http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/http_cache.html
.. _`ESI`: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes
.. _`Varnish`: https://www.varnish-cache.org/

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