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.

Wow! What a day. Today was the first day of talks for Symfony Live, the first international Symfony conference. Even the organizers were surprised by the turnout, as many people signed up at the last moment, pushing the assistance over 300 people (unofficially). The place was packed and more chairs had to be added to sit everybody.

The day started with an introduction to internationalization support in Symfony by Thomas Rabaix. He was a bit nervous as he was the first speaker of the day, but the content was very good and in the end it was an excellent talk. “Working with the admin generator” by John Cleveley was very well presented including lots of great tips on extending the admin generator and it even included some funny British humor.

After lunch, Dennis Benkert (organizer of Symfony Day in Cologne, Germany) presented a very good introduction to Doctrine migrations, which turned out to be a good appetizer for the main plate, Jonathan Wage‘s “Doctrine 2: Not the Same Old PHP ORM”. The title of the talk says it all! Doctrine 2.0 is a full rewrite with new code, new concepts with major performance improvements. We can’t wait to start our next new project so we can use it. Then Stefan Koopmanschap followed with an extensive overview on how you can get help and give back to the community. He listed different resources (mailing lists, forums, symfony website and IRC channels) and encouraged people to organize events and participate in them. The day closed with the whole symfony core team on stage answering all sort of questions by the audience. One interesting topic that we are following closely was brought up by Lukas Smith when he asked the community to step up in producing top-notch web applications with this quality framework. And Fabien was trying hard not to spill the beans about Symfony 2.0 but the crowd was really pulling any kind of tricks to get more details about it.

During the breaks and lunch, we had the opportunity to meet many more symfony developers and clients. If you have not introduced yourself, don’t miss the chance, we may even have some t-shirts left to give out; they are going fast.

Tomorrow is the last day and we can’t wait. Many more exciting talks precede the big announcement: Symfony 2.0. Don’t miss it!

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!