Symfony Live 2011: Day 2

My head is full of Symfony2 components, bundles, technologies, Java side projects, subframeworks and other cool new things i’ve heard the past two days.

If one thing becomes clear after 2 days of Symfony Live, it is the fact that Symfony2 is built with best practices, great design patterns and separation of concerns in mind (and the lessons learned from symfony 1)

It is very losely coupled, and consists of a lot of standalone components glued together by the dependency injection container. This a great concept from an architectural and best practices point of view. What this means for me as a current symfony 1.4 user i don’t know yet.

Right now it looks like i need to learn a lot of different things, but i’m very eager, really!

Amongst others (not all new, but fairly new to me)

• The user friendly and very promising Apostrophe Now CMS plugin (still only SF1)
• The new form framework / annotations / validation feature without all the business rules and ORM couplings.
• The Twig templating engine and its extensibility is like “Smarty on steroids” (good quote Sjors!)
• Assetic asset management framework will give you an easy way to manage your assets, javascripts, stylesheets
• All the new caching stuff that will make thing blazingly fast (HttpCache, Varnish etc) and using it in a SF1 application ()
• GIT …
• The CMF framework project, which is still in a pretty early stage

One thing that really looked like a interesting way of incorporating testing features and user stories in a project is Behavior Driven Design (BDD) BDD defines a spec that not only programmers can learn, it’s also for readable non-technical people. There is a PHP framework called Behat.

The talk on Solr was pretty condensed for new users. A few months ago we did a Solr training so we felt more at ease with the load of information. Good to know there is a sfSolrPlugin available to play with Solr, that contains everythign you need to get started out of the box.

Nevertheless i’n absolutely amazed by all the beautiful things i have seen and heard.

Congratulations, thank you and respect for all the people who contributed to his in the last few years.

See you next year!

- Hidde

“Back from an exhausting second day at the Cité Universitaire. Partly due to some lack of sleep, but mainly because it was packed with techical talk. We had an early kickoff today – 8:30am instead of 9:30. I attended “Symfony2: from the trenches” by Lukas Kahwe Smith, Jordi Bogginano and Jeremy Mikola. A sort of live walkthrough through some of the main Symfony2 components with an array of best practices and first-hand experiences. For me personally it filled a lot of gaps left after reading the Reloaded documentation and playing around with the sandbox. A positive start of the day.

Another interesting talk was the one by Fabien Potencier on HTTP Caching. Quite a bit of theory jammed into 50 minutes, but nonetheless – or probably therefore? -  a highly informative speech. It mainly covered two chapters of the HTTP 1.1 Bis Specification. A document that is a must read for us web developers, and for those who haven’t yet, should download it this week and read it back-to-back, to paraphrase Fabien.

A third personal highlight was the BDD (Behavior Driven Development) bit by Konstantin Kudryashov. BDD, an evolution of TDD, is a methodology combining both Unit and Acceptance Testing. He launched a Symfony2 Bundle recently, called Behat, that implements a small framework for this Agile development technique. Quite inspiring as Driebit has recently started with Scrum and is doing research into different testing techniques.”
- Sander