Robert's Blog

Symfony Plugin Review: sfEasyGMapPlugin

Symfony Plugin Review: sfEasyGMapPlugin

The sfEasyGmapPlugin seeks to encapsulate much many of the features in the Google Maps API and make them easily available in the Symfony PHP 5 Framework.

The Test:

I set up a very basic Symfony 1.2.9 project and installed the plugin.  Installation of the plugin was a breeze the command line install worked flawlesly. Which is very nice, and unexpected, as many plugins work better if you install them manually.

The sample module worked exactly as advertised, after I corrected my Google Maps API key.

Pretty soon I had an example module created and was inputting my own locations, geocoding addresses, re centering, and using some nice syntactic sugar like the centerAndZoomOnMarkers method that does exactly what it says it does.

The example module covers the basics, but I’d also encourage you to browse through the classes to get a sense of that this plugin will do.

My testing was fairly simplistic and I don’t have any experience with this app on a large application, however it would be my first choice if I had a project requiring mapping.

The Results:

The code is well done, object oriented, intuitive, & very easy to use.

My only criticism is that it could do with a little more content in it’s PHP docs, but that’s pretty minor.

I would strongly reccommend this plugin, and look forward to an excuse to use it, and I’d like to thank the authors for providing the community with such great code.

Thanks to:

• Fabrice Bernhard
• Laurent Bachelier
• Tom Haskins-Vaughan
• Vincent Guillon

The authors come mostly from Allomatch