Symfony-live 2010, Paris. Conference review. Day 1.

I'd like to summarize the things we've learn from the Symfony Conference. It will help me to keep all things sorted out in my head. it could be useful for you to see what happens about main tool we use for development.

The main thing I've got from the event is that there is a successful commercial organization that suports the framework ( http://www.sensiolabs.com/en ). They are intended to support the framework for at least 3 years (latest versions) and there is large community of developers who develope both Symfony components and use Symfony in commercial projects. The new version of framework is scheduled for late 2010. It will implement the latest features realized in PHP 5.3.2 (latest PHP release). Thanks to removing old code and writing code from scratch it is going to be pretty fast.

Below I'm going to review each speech.

Internationalization

Describes the ways to set internationalization and localization of the output.

key features described:

• How the system determines the current culture, ways to set culture
• Customization of URLs like /recettes/recherche in French and /recipes/search in English
• Ways of storing i18n data in the DB
• Ways of setting proper number, date, currency formats based on culture (already used on mm4ac)
• Translating standard forms labels, errors, content based on culture
• Description of mgI18nPlugin that helps to i18nize the sites.

Working With The Admin Generator

This speech contained list of good practices in using admin generator. We've already used most of them:

• When you should or shouldn't use admin generator
• Customizing backend URL with routing
• Adding related data to the form
• I18n in admin forms
• Tweaking CSS to change admin generator layout, creating themes

PHP, Cloud And Microsoft Symfony Live 2010

Just some advertisements of MS products

Symfony Internals

Not a well prepared speech, same as one of the Symfony' book chapter

symfony Live 2010 - Using Doctrine Migrations

Very interesting speech and usefull technique keeping the DB structure up to date when developing sites.

The speech is not directly is usefull for us as soon as we use Propel as an ORM but Propel's migration is almost the same as Doctrene's one.

The conclusion is that using migrations is quite usefull and should be used especially on the projects that are still in development stage or are supported. It saves a lot of time and allows to avoid the ORM errors that caused by wrong DB structure.

Doctrine 2 - Not The Same Old Php Orm

This speech is generally the presentation of future Doctrine 2.0 release of the ORM.

Symfony has decided to support Doctrene because developers are going to support it. Propel is as good as Doctrene is now but nobody is going to develop Propel further. Just support..

Doctrine is going to make a big step forward in 2.0 . It will use latest PHP's object oriented possibilities etc. It's important to know that it will work on PHP 5.3 and later. So when choosing hosting we need to keep this in mind.

Doctrine is going to be relesed late 2010 (I think that it will be released with Symfony 2.0) and will nto be compatible with 1.x versions.

So my conclusion is the following: we should not pend any time and lean/use doctrene 1.x in our projects. Propel is good enough for it. As soon as Doctrene 2 is released we'll need to review and start using it because it's going to be big step forward. Keep in mind having hosting with PHP 5.3

An offline admin generator with HTML 5 and Gears

This speech is completely rubbish. The example shown didn't work. There is no support for HTML 5 in any common browsers. A lot of ssumptions.

The Symfony Community - How to (get) help

Some information about future PHP and Symfony events. Places where you can share your experience and get help on the internet.

That's it for Day 1.