A few days have passed since we arrived back in the US after almost a week in Paris, and we are still thinking about what an amazing week it was. We blogged about Symfony Live day 1 last week but day 2 was what many people were really anxious about.

The day started with Lukas Smith’s talk about using the new Symfony components in their own custom framework Okapi. Xavier de Cock’s talk followed, where he displayed a series of good tips on how to get better performance of small sections of code where you would think there is no more room for improvement. These are really useful when your code is iterated several thousands times and beyond, like in his case, an email sender application using SwiftMailer.

Xavier de Cock

The second part of the day was also charged with very interesting talks. Kris Wallsmith talked about deploying Symfony applications to the cloud and he released a very useful plugin for Doctrine to connect to multiple master/slave replicated database servers. Alvaro Videla followed with a fascinating presentation about his experience running and debugging a large site with lots of traffic. They found several areas where Symfony needed some optimizations which now have been added to the latest release. How to make Symfony run faster is always a topic we are interested in. Opening for the main talk of the day, Dustin Whittle from Yahoo explained how they use Symfony in some of their very popular websites. One of his topics was about deploying Symfony applications, where he spoke about a plugin they developed in-house but could not release due to the many ties with their core business. He mentioned that he wants to form a group to research and develop a plugin or process that will ease the task of deploying apps, which is something we have been thinking for quite some time now, and we look forward to be part of that.

Dusting Whittle talks about the importance of caching.

For most of day 1, the Symfony core team challenged the attendees to submit use cases explaining how Symfony helped businesses and individuals improve their applications and operations. We have been developing with Symfony for a while so we have several examples which we can talk about. We decided to go with writing a use case of our Live Chat system which we use on our site and we were honored to have been selected as one of the top use cases! As we mentioned before, we plan to release this software open source, and with the release of Symfony 2.0 we want to use this opportunity to learn the new framework and showcase its power.

At this point, the conference was already a great success. The attendance surpassed any expectations (aprox 350 attendees), the quality of talks and speakers was superb, the social events around the conference brought together the community in a way I had not seen before.  Although we did not get to meet and speak with everybody, we were able to meet with many and this was the most valuable part of the conference. You can look at the slides online, you can watch videos or download code, but meeting the very same people that create, enhance and use the framework is only possible during a conference like this one. May I also add that all this was due to the excellent community growing around Symfony.

Fabien Potencier introduces symfony 2.0

The icing on the cake was when Fabien Potencier presented Symfony 2.0. His presentation was great, you can view the video online thanks to Ben Haines. What he unveiled is a state-of-the-art framework which we think will revolutionize the PHP frameworks’ world. Many of the hard to understand and learn aspects of symfony 1 have been removed or replaced with simpler concepts, “less magic” which tends to also mean “less WTF” problems to quote Jon Wage.  With the power of the dependency injection container, Symfony 2.0 can reach speeds other frameworks could only dream of, and coupled with Doctrine 2, developing PHP applications is going to be fun and easier than before.

Some other interesting notes from the conference:

• phpBB is considering using Symfony 2.0 for the next version of this super-popular forums software. We were able to meet with Nils Adermann, the new lead developer for phpBB and it looks like he decided to make the switch for all the right reasons. Perhaps we will finally add those forums we keep talking about at ServerGrove.
• Symfony 2.0 will use components from Zend Framework, initially Zend_Cache and Zend_Log. This makes total sense as many Symfony developers already use ZF components, it is great that the Symfony core team decided to take advantage of some of the high quality code in ZF and avoid re-invent the wheel.
• Symfony 2.0 has a new website, http://symfony-reloaded.org/ with examples, documentation and of course, the source code of a preview release!
• There are already plans in progress for the next Symfony conference, but in the mean time, start planning to assist SymfonyCamp in June 2010 and SymfonyDay later this year.

One closing note, as you may know, Symfony 2.0 runs only with PHP 5.3 and above. We have already been offering PHP 5.3 on our VPS accounts for many months and we can install symfony 2.0 for you if you want to test drive it, but bear in mind that like Symfony 2 our support for 2.0 is also in alpha but we hope to get up to speed soon enough. That being said, we are very interested in hearing feedback from people who have tested 2.0 on our VPS accounts.

We arrived in Paris on Saturday morning. It was snowing and very cold. We took advantage of the weekend and were able to walk around the city, including a visit to the Palace of Versailles.

Today we joined several symfony developers in a photowalk which ended in a restaurant for a mandatory dinner where we had some great discussions about Symfony, Zend Framework and many more. Matthew Weier O’Phinney, lead developer of ZF, Jon Wage (Doctrine) and Stefan Koopmanschap (symfony community manager), among others were present, which showcases how important is to attend these events by giving you direct access to core developers.

This was a great way to start the conference, even though it has not officially started. We look forward for more exciting things to come. Tomorrow is training day.

Next week we will be present at Symfony Live 2010, the second edition of this conference where symfony developers meet to learn and network. We are very excited to not only be present but also  sponsor supporting the symfony community.

If you can’t make it to Paris, keep checking this blog for daily updates or follow us on twitter for more frequent notes.  In the case you will be present, please say hi and introduce yourself, we are looking forward to meet clients and developers.

à bientôt!

Just one month to go for the 2nd symfony live conference! This year’s event will be in English even though the event will be held in Paris. Who said the French refuse to speak English in France? The event organizers have put together a great presentation lineup. This is a great opportunity to meet with symfony developers, learn more about symfony and most important to be part of the release of Symfony 2.

This is the second year we sponsor symfony live and we can’t wait! We are looking forward to meeting developers, clients and friends. If you are going to be there, look for us and say hi!

The PHP community is live, more than ever before. This past week we were present at Zendcon 09, one of the main PHP conferences of the year. Despite the world economic woes, the conference was packed with people from all continents. We had the chance to meet and speak with top PHP developers in the world. We also encountered many people that know us and our efforts to help the PHP community, this was very satisfying because it reinforces our notion that we are in the right track (our marketing strategy is simple: less banner ads & more support for the community).

This year’s Zendcon had an immediate effect: Shortly after it finished, there was an announcement that the main CakePHP developers are splitting and starting a new framework called Lithium. Later, as a result of the Framework shootout and feedback from the San Francisco Symfony Meetup, Fabien Potencier announced that Symfony 2.0 will be using PHP 5.3 features, just as Zend Framework 2 will, breaking compatibility with PHP 5.2 installations. We support this decision because we know it is important to support the PHP community and embrace its new features. As you may know, we already offer PHP 5.3 in virtual servers (VPS) and plan to add shared hosting servers with PHP 5.3 only.

The San Francisco Symfony Meetup coincided with Zendcon, so we could not miss the opportunity to assist and meet more Symfony users. We thank Dogster for being such a great host, it was great to meet the Symfony community in the Bay area and look forward to do things together.

If you did not attend Zendcon and are in Europe, don’t miss PHP Barcelona coming up later this week.

And finally, on November 14th, the Symfony BugHuntDay will take place. People can also participate remotely, so it is important if you can get involved.

An important part of our job is to stay up to date with technologies. Conferences are a great way to do it. Not only you will learn new things no matter how senior you are, you will also meet great people with similar interests.

We support many conferences, as many as we can. And we also try to attend frequently. Here are some of the most interesting PHP conferences in the coming months:

CodeWorks 2009 – Sept 22-Oct 5, multiple US cities.

From the organizers of php|works and publishers of PHP Architect, here comes an interesting new concept in PHP conferences. A great group of PHP top speakers will travel the US, giving talks in 7 different cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, D.C. and New York). Lucky, as you can see, our home town is on the list so we will be there to learn and meet old and new friends. If you will be attending or speaking, look for the ServerGrove guys. Cal Evans, one of the speakers, is posting a very interesting journal. The quality of the speakers lineup makes this inexpensive conference a must-go.

ZendCon 2009 – Oct 19-22, San Jose, CA.

The 5th edition of one of the top PHP conferences in the calendar will take place on Oct 19-22 in San Jose, CA. This is the most corporate oriented of the conferences, with a lot of emphasis on Zend Framework. This year there will be an interesting session with lead developers of all major PHP frameworks, since many of our customers use them, we encourage them to go to ZendCon this year.

Symfony Live 2009 – Feb 15-17, Paris, France.

We’ve heard that the first edition was a complete success, so we are determined to not miss this one and we are going to Paris even though it will be in winter, the best time of the year in Miami. If you are a Symfony developer, or are thinking on learning Symfony, this is the event for you. This conference will be in English. There will be talks for everyone, from entry-level to long time developers. More on this conference as we get closer to it.

Other Conferences

If you can’t make it to any of these, don’t worry, there are more conferences scheduled for the months to come. In October, PHP NW 2009 will take place in Manchester, UK. Forum PHP Paris 2009 will take place in November. If you know of a cool PHP conference not listed here, let us know!

We will keep you updated on these and other conferences. For the ones where we will assist, we will give updates as the events take place, so stay tuned. If you are attending any of these conferences, look for us and say hi!

Symfonyday 2009 will be held September 4th 2009 in Cologne, Germany. The conference will be held in English and has an awesome list of speakers. This is definitely worth checking out. http://www.symfonyday.com/

We are pleased to announce that we will be a sponsor for PHPday09 in Verona, Italy on the 15th and 16th of May. We would like to thank our Italian friends for their support and for being such good clients. And of course we are happy to help out the Italia PHP community.  Grazie a tutti!

This weekend will take place PHP Appalachia, a gathering for PHP enthusiasts in the middle of the Appalachia montains. Talks will take place all weekend, including on night campfires! Keep an eye on the website to follow the news.

We are proud to be sponsoring this event and help the PHP community keep growing in numbers and quality.

Coming up in November, another major PHP conference will take place in Atlanta, USA: php|works 08, which we will also be sponsoring.

We are excited to announce that we are sponsoring php|works 08, a conference organized by the publishers of php|architect magazine. If you do any kind of work with PHP or Python, we strongly suggest  that you attend this event.

This year’s conference will also feature a Python track of talks and tutorials.

We will continue supporting and sponsoring developer community events, without them, Open Source would not be the success it is today.