San Francisco has just waved goodbye to delegates of the Symfony Live 2011 conference. Organized by French-based Sensio Labs, the company behind a web application framework Symfony, it was another opportunity to meet the community of developers and entrepreneurs, discuss issues with core team members and exchange ideas and experiences related to working with this popular PHP platform. It was a two-day event, tied to a satellite free hacking weekend. Its European sister conference will be held between 2-5 March.
Naturally, the leading theme for delegates throughout the conference was Symfony2, a new generation of PHP frameworks and the first major revamp of symfony, as its preview release is already available for developers and the stable release is just around the corner.
Dustin Whittle put the audience in the picture with his historical sketch about the rise of Symfony in the US. He stated with the early days, when Sensio Labs established a partnership to launch its services across the Atlantic, and went on to talk about how it quickly caught on with major companies, including Yahoo!. He stressed that the guiding principles behind investing in a new web PHP framework were keeping the final product simpler and more functional than others.
This provided a smooth transition into the presentation on unit testing by OpenSky’s Bulat Shakirzyanov, a feature that the Symfony community feel especially passionate about. Getting things right in this department is essential to ensure integrity and stability of code and final products as they evolve over time, often becoming more and more complex. Constant threat of debugging would be difficult to tolerate. Bulat came up to the podium again with fellow developers on the second day to share plenty of useful tricks and tips about Symfony2
Thomas Boutell leaped to Apostrophe, a Symfony-driven content management system and content management framework that is expected to deliver on three promises – be easy for non-expert clients to update, be difficult to misuse and be ready for handy extensions by Symfony developers. There were also presentations about gains and problems connected with using Git and Doctrine, as well as a talk by a phpBB employee about why Symfony is the framework of choice for their category-leading bulletin board software.
Other topics included using template engines (Ryan Weaver on Twig), addressing problems that are not PHP-based (Stefan Koopmanschap), asset management for PHP 5.3 (Kris Wallsmith) and moving from Doctrine to a better way of improving persistence of PHP objects (Pablo Diez).
Fabien Potencier, the key mind behind Symfony, came up to the podium a few times, including giving demonstrations of Symfony2, explaining HTTP specifications and taking questions from the audience about practical questions. He announced that the stable version of Symfony2 will not be launched during Symfony Live in Paris, but the framework’s API will remain stable after this date.
We are looking forward to another meeting of the Symfony community in March in Paris.
This is the highlight of Symfony Live conference 2011:
