Symfony Live San Francisco, Day 2

Day two got started by people dropping in, grabbing coffee and some food, and talking a bit, until Jonathan Wage and Bulat Shakirzyanov took the stage for the opening talk, with Kris Wallsmith joining them. Together, the three of them shared lots of useful tips and tricks for people just starting out with Symfony2.

Ryan Weaver was up next, speaking about how to be dangerous with Twig. With Symfony2, Twig can be an important part of the development process if you choose so. Ryan showed examples, advantages and use cases of why and how to use Twig in your Symfony2 project.

Fabien then explained the HTTP specifications. Well, maybe not the whole specifications, but a huge part of it. The focus was however on the HTTP caching. Fabien really went deep into the cache options of the HTTP specifications, explaining the different situations you could get with requests and caching using HTTP.

After lunch it was my time to keep people awake during the hard time that is that post-lunch hour. I delivered a talk on the situations where you don't want to use PHP. I tried to explain that those situations indeed exist, and why you would want to look to more than just PHP-based solutions.

Then, Emmanuel Cohen and Marc Weistroff came on stage to share some of their experiences with one of the projects they did at Sensio. In this project, they mixed symfony 1 and Symfony2 in one project. Specifically, they used the Symfony2 ESI caching to improve the performance.

Kris Wallsmith then took the stage, a bit earlier than the schedule because otherwise he might've missed his flight. His talk about Assetic was really interesting, it dove deep into asset management in Symfony2. Explanations were really detailed with lots of examples of how things worked, including the integration with Twig.

Doctrator. A very new project to implement behaviors in Doctrine2, was then presented by Pablo Díez. Doctrator basically grabs back to the idea of behaviors that was available in Doctrine 1. An interesting talk, though on Twitter some doubt was raised as to the reasons why one would want to do this. If nothing else, this should be a good reason to switch from Doctrine 1 to Doctrine2.

Last up was Fabien Potencier, who brought us up to speed with the internals of Symfony2. Specifically, Fabien talked about things like interfaces in Symfony2 and the way Symfony2 works with these interfaces. After the talk, he also answered some questions from the audience. One important announcement: Originally, the final release of Symfony2 was scheduled for release at Symfony Live in Paris. This won't happen anymore. Instead, the first Release Candidate will be available by then. Which is a similar milestone: After that, the API is stable and won't be changed anymore.

We're all looking back at a great conference. Definitely also thanks to the sponsors: Microsoft, Servergrove, P'unk Avenue, NationalField, Dell KACE, Pagoda Box and OSS Cube. And thanks to the speakers, who shared their experience, knowledge and opinions with us. And last but definitely not least thanks to the Sensio crew, who organized the whole thing.