Symfony Day 11 Cologne

After a tiresome and informative 9 hours at Symfony Day in Cologne I had the plan of writing this post in the ICE back to Amsterdam. Unfortunately the letter S key of the laptop I brought didn’t work. It’s hard writing about Symfony without using the letter S. You can talk about anything, but not Symfony and similar stuff.

It was the third – and last in its current form, as was announced afterwards – Symfony Day in Cologne. Next year it will be succeeded by a Symfony Live event which will be held in a bigger venue and in a bigger city. Berlin!
The current location is the Komed MediaPark; a convention centre at walking distance of the Main Train Station.

After a slow and little bit chaotic start the conference was kicked-off by Igor Wiedler. He talked about Silex. A micro-framework build on top of the Symfony2 components for which he is one of the lead developers. Silex is a lean and mean framework that enables you to map dynamic routes to controllers in a single step. Its lightweight stuff (a single Phar include) to build lightweight apps. Looks quite suitable for prototyping and your personal once-off mini projects.

Next up was Marc Weistroff who had a good talk about clean pragmatic code and some best practices and programming principles. He spoke about Separation of Concerns, a recurring theme throughout the day, probably the fundamental principle behind the Symfony Components architecture.

The third session was a duo talk by Stefan Koopmanschap and Christian Schaefer. Pretentious blatter versus modest and insightful about sums it up. I promise I will actually write a shitload of constructive criticism on Joind.In actually.

After the lunch… no wait… let’s talk about during the lunch:

Thomas Rabaix was next to drag us through our lunch dips. Didn’t work. I fought off sleep and almost dozed off a couple of times. The topic was Sonata AdminBunble and could have been an interesting hour. Unfortunately he tried to crank too much in his 60 minutes in which he was more or less summing up functionalities in monotone English with a heavy French accent. Thomas started of by saying: “I didn’t like the Symfony 1 Admin generator…”. Next time please tell us why you didn’t like it and how you did things better in Sonata. The concept and thought processes behind your approach are much more interesting than their outcome.

Following Rabaix was Hugo Hamon talking about the Symfony2 Console component. A good talk in which he gradually build a command-line hangman game to show us the power and extensibility of the new CLI tool. He compared a command (or task) to a controller: input/output versus request/response and promoted refactoring your command line the way you would refactor your controller code. First: just write everything in the controller or command to make it work. Second: move the business logic to where it belongs. Often resulting in just a couple of lines of code in you controller or command. Separation of concerns.

Last speaker before Fabien’s keynote was Richard Miller with a great talk on the evolution of, or maybe to, Dependency Injection. He had a (more or less) real world example of some crappy, highly coupled, piece of code, which he kept on refactoring by removing dependencies (decoupling) until eventually you were left with needing something to inject the dependencies back into your application… wait… what?!

After a failed intermezzo in which they were planning to officially launch SensioLabs Germany with cake and what not, the stage was given to Fabien Potencier. He had a bit of a philosophical lecture on why Symfony2 is more than a classic MVC framework: Symfony2 is a full-stack framework, but Symfony2 is Symfony2 Components too. SymfonyTWO! Wow, it all makes sensio now!