Symfony Live San Francisco, Day 1

The day was opened by a Microsoft developer evangelist, who showed some ways of using symfony on Windows, introducing the Web Platform Installer which, in a couple of clicks will set you up a complete web development environment including PHP. The most important message he had, though, was that we shouldn't necessarily see Windows to be a replacement of our own envirnoment, but we should see opportunities there. There's many companies out there running Windows that may need our services.

Fabien then opened the conference officially, welcoming everyone and introducing the conference.

Quickly we went onward to Dustin Whittle, who presented the history of symfony, starting in the early days and going all the way to the current developments around Symfony2. This was an interesting talk for people who have been around a while (a trip down memory lane), but also good for people new to symfony to know where it all came from.

Next up was Bulat Shakirzyanov from OpenSky, who spoke on unit testing. Bulat explained what unit testing was, what excuses we use not to unit tests, and how to actually implement unit testing. Bulat dove really deep into unit testing your code, so after this talk, everybody should be able to write tests.

Then is was time to look at a CMS/CMF built on top of symfony 1.4. Tom Boutell showed some really inspiring things that can be done with the Apostrophe CMS. There is so much to Apostrophe that I didn't know yet (and I'm guessing most people didn't). Following the Twitter timeline of #sflive2011, there were multiple people saying "I'm going to use Apostrophe for my next project", and I think this was the overall feeling of a lot of people.

After an excellent lunch, it was time for Scott Chacon to get us up to speed on Git. His talk was not an introduction to Git this time around, but more about the approaches you can take in using Git to contribute (or accept contributions) for (Open Source) projects.

Jonathan Wage then discussed Doctrine in the real world. Examples of how Doctrine2 (and Symfony2) are being used in real world situations. An interesting talk followed by some interesting discussions after questions from the audience.

Nils Adermann of phpBB (you remember the guys, they donated 5000 euro towards the security audit!) then gave us an overview of the history of the phpBB software, and then went on to explain the reasons for phpBB to pick Symfony2 as the base of the 4th version of their software.

Last up for the first day was Fabien Potencier. He threw out his prepared talk the night before, because he decided he wanted to show how easy it is to use Symfony2. And he clearly succeeded in that, judging from the response from the audience. Fabien went through the steps it takes to start a simple project, starting from plain old PHP objects to a Symfony2 project. He also mentioned there will eventually be different distributions of Symfony2 for different purposes. It cleared up a lot of unclarity amongst many people present.

And that concluded the first conference day of Symfony Live San Francisco. Today is the second (and last) day of Symfony Live San Francisco. A report will follow tomorrow.