[TYPO3-mvc] Feedback on extbase

[Sebastian Kurfürst]

Hey Nils,

thanks for so much feedback :-)

> However, the amount of abstraction used by extbase is sometimes hard to
> cope with! With our infrastructure Eclipse is not exactly the tool of
> choice, so I was limited to a (compared to eclipse) rather basic editor.
I'd be interested why you did not use Eclipse? Most of the developers
here use Eclipse, I have recently switched to the new NetBeans version
as it is soo much faster, but both offer nice autocompletion etc.

> And following some method all the way down to Typo3Backend.php and back
> can be a pain in the arse!
Definitely :)

> Having that said, I love abstraction. It's what helps keep code
> manageable. But the degree to which extbase uses it makes it hard to
> keep up with all its options. And with the lack of a good documentation
> (there was certainly none when I started) it is not so easy to keep
> track of them.
Documentation is a major point, we are working a lot on that (Jochen and
myself are working on a Book on Extbase -- in German, but the reference
will be of course freely available in English). Unfortunately we cannot
give out any pre-releases of the documentation right now, but I hope we
can do that in a few weeks...

> In our application handbook we defined that the labels should become red
> on errors, and not the inputs.
> So I tried for some time to replicate the behaviour of the inputs until
> I finally just copy pasted the form.textbox ViewHelper and changed it to
> label (with some modifications of course).
I think that the documentation is lacking badly here. In case you extend
AbstractFormFieldViewHelper, you get a method
"setErrorClassAttribute()", which will automatically add a CSS class to
the tag which is being rendered. I'm not sure, maybe this part should be
put to another place in the API, tough (as it is not marked @api).

> However that was not the end of my pain with fluid. I had to make a form
> which allowed registering a team and up to 5 users. I started by adding
> all objects to the form, then went over to just the team and handling
> the users over direct paths and name="". However neither worked or
> worked the way I needed it so I ended up using a container array. But of
> course in an array the verification doesn't work.
> So the solution was to write the whole verification and
> error-presentation (in extbase and in the template respectively) myself.
> In a "classic" extension this would have been the normal course of
> action, but somehow I expected this to be solved in a cleaner way.
> So this is one of my big "must have"'s, form handling and verification
> with multiple objects.
I fully agree with you on this point. It's on the ToDo list, though I
cannot promise any delivery dates right now.

> So after this big holdup there was barely an interruption to my coding
> until I hit the next snag. How the hell am I supposed to find out that
> getByUid (and the magic methods aswell, inherited from
> Tx_Extbase_Persistence_Repository of course) takes an array of UID's and
> behaves just like SQL's IN LIST().
> I didn't find any information on that on the web and to date haven't
> found the piece of code that makes this godlike feature work (tough I
> suppose it must be somewhere hidden in the dark forest of the QOM section)!
This should work, yes. However I think the API documentation of this
method needs to be a lot better - could you open a ticket for this?

> [pid]
> But for future projects it is a must have feature to be able to define
> pids directly a) in a query and b) when storing!
I am not sure about this. With a) and b) we lose upwards compatibility
with FLOW3, as we don't have a "PID" concept there. However, I agree
with you that there must be a more flexible way to hook into the
persistence backend if needed.

> Now we're testing the application and hopefully it will hold together
> once we put it in the wild. After which I will give you some more
> feedback on whether it buckled under load or held.
Great :-) And of course if there was a load problem, please help us fix it!

> Whilst doing that I will also put up some bug reports/feature requests,
> so stay tuned.
Thanks a bunch!

> I wrote this feedback in the hope that it is helpful to the dev's and
> maybe inspire one or three to try extbase with their next project.
Yep, that is very helpful to us :-) I'm very eager to hear feedback!


Greets,
Sebastian