New in Symfony 3.2: Misc. improvements

VarDumper improvements

Contributed by Nicolas Grekas

The VarDumper component gained lots of new features and improvements in Symfony 3.2. One of the most interesting additions is the option to return the dumped contents instead of outputting them. This allows to store the dump into a string when using the component methods instead of the Twig dump() function:

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use Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Cloner\VarCloner;
use Symfony\Component\VarDumper\Dumper\CliDumper;

$cloner = new VarCloner();
$dumper = new CliDumper();

// Before: dump contents
$dumper->dump($cloner->cloneVar($variable));

// After: store the dumped contents in a string
$result = $dumper->dump($cloner->cloneVar($variable), true);

Other interesting new features are the maxDepth and maxStringLength display options (see #18948) and the possibility to dump subparts of cloned data structures (see #19672).

Allow to compile classes that use annotations

Contributed by Titouan Galopin in #19205

A simple way to improve the performance of Symfony applications is to use the addClassesToCompile() method in your bundles to add some of your classes to the boostrap file generated by Symfony to lower the I/O file operations.

However, a caveat of this method is that you can't compile classes that use annotations. In Symfony 3.2, we added a new method called addAnnotatedClassesToCompile() to allow caching those classes too. An added bonus of compiling the classes with annotations is that the annotation reader caches are warmed up too.

Lastly, both addClassesToCompile() and addAnnotatedClassesToCompile() now support declaring classes using wildcards:

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$this->addAnnotatedClassesToCompile(array(
    // classes defined using wildcards
    '**Bundle\\Controller\\',
    '**Bundle\\Entity\\',
    // class defined explicitly using its FQCN
    'Symfony\\Bundle\\FrameworkBundle\\Controller\\Controller',
));

Removed dependencies from the FrameworkBundle

Contributed by Fabien Potencier

The Symfony FrameworkBundle turns the decoupled Symfony Components into a web framework. In the previous Symfony versions, this bundle defined lots of hard dependencies with those components.

In Symfony 3.2, we've eliminated lots of hard dependencies, so these components won't be installed in your application if you don't use them: Templating component, Translation component, Asset component, Security Core and Security CSRF components and the Doctrine annotations library.

Added an AST dumper for ExpressionLanguage

Contributed by Grégoire Pineau in #19013

In Symfony 3.2, the ExpressionLanguage component added a way to dump the AST (Abstract Syntax Tree) of expressions. This will allow to analyze the expressions statically (to validate them, optimize them, etc.) and even to modify those expressions dynamically.

Refactored Twig extensions

Contributed by Fabien Potencier in #20093 and #20094

Starting from Twig 1.26, the implementation of filters, functions and tests can use a different class than the extension they belong to. In Symfony 3.2, the most critical Twig extensions have been refactored to implement this feature, such as HttpKernelExtension, which defines the render() and controller() Twig functions. In addition, some optimizations have been introduced to not load Twig extensions when their associated component is not installed.