[v3] Rework Populator

[theofidry]

While reviewing the populator, if I got things right, most of it is simply creating populated objects from the set of property/value got from the Fixture. But instead of doing it ourself, maybe we could make use of Symfony Serializer instead? Pretty sure it would already handle most of our use case and it would always be possible to add customer denormalizers to handle most custom work.

If we do so, I think that would remove a fair bit of code from alice, which is always nice. Besides I think it would be more performant as well.

@tshelburne WDYT?

[tshelburne]

I think this makes sense - the Symfony Serializer is also much more likely to get bug fixes / etc. Generally I try to reduce the number of dependencies, but this feels like a smart one.

[tshelburne]

My only question - does Serializer rely on annotated classes? We don't want to introduce anything that suddenly takes us back to "you must use Symfony" territory.

[theofidry]

does Serializer rely on annotated classes?

Could you give an example? I'm not sure to have the same definition of annotated classes :P

We don't want to introduce anything that suddenly takes us back to "you must use Symfony" territory.

Never, I don't want alice to become a Symfony bundle, that would be awful.

[tshelburne]

I mean does Serializer look to the class for Doctrine-style ORM annotations or anything like that.

[theofidry]

Nope, it uses reflection by default and if needed we can register custom denormalizers.

[theofidry]

Closing as will deal with it in #265