Fabien Potencier of the French-based Sensio Labs knows how to build up suspense. Rumors of his company coming up with the major new version of the symfony PHP framework, called Symfony2, had been around for some time, when he released its alpha edition in February 2010. The much anticipated final release was originally planned for late 2010, but it was later moved to March 2011 when Sensio Labs is planning launch it at two global conferences for the Symfony community.
The project website has skillfully encouraged coders and developers to contribute by trying out test-stage features and experimenting otherwise. Preview information about what has improved from symfony to Symfony2 sounds exciting even if you are not familiar with the framework and the buzz on Twitter and blogs is so intense that it can make you think everybody is waiting for a major Hollywood movie to come out.
These are the features to look for in Symfony2:
1. Flexibility
Fabien Potencier and his team at Sensio Labs make a point of trying to create a product that combines simplicity with multiple applications. Symfony2 is designed to be a primary tool for developing small personal homepages and tailor-made, enterprise-class web solutions. To make it possible, it is going to be based on a reduced, low-level infrastructure that can be quickly and easily mastered and extended to incorporate third-party libraries, like Doctrine, Propel or Zend. In fact, in an effort to consolidate PHP development resources in one full-stack solution, Symfony2 will integrate the best ideas from other frameworks and tools, such as PHPUnit for more effective testing. Going from the core, or the kernel, of Symfony2, which includes nothing but the most optimal configuration and is ready to have plug-ins attached, to a more customized product has been made as easy as it is only possible thanks to the so-called bundles, sets of extension files that developers can share. Such functions as the Dependency Injection Container or the Request Handler simplify the implementation of desirable design patterns even further.
2. Speed and Performance
Reducing the complexity of symfony and embracing best practice examples from other frameworks and libraries serve the same purpose – allowing developers to work more intuitively and, in consequence, faster. At a time when clients demand increasingly challenging solutions to increasingly tighter deadlines, the responsiveness of the framework becomes a serious issue. In internal benchmarking experiments at Sensio Labs, its engineers have reported their new product’s superiority over most other PHP development tools (for example, it was twice to three times faster than symfony1.4.2).
3. Usability
Symfony2 is not only designed to help create lighter, more reliable and more easily maintainable websites and applications in PHP, but also to make the entire process of achieving the end product more friendly for an average developer. In other words, it promises more productivity, more usability and more, well, fun from coding.
Clearcode develops projects based on Symfony framework.
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