Open-Source cross-pollination

September 23, 2008 · Published by Avatar of Fabien Potencier Fabien Potencier

In his famous keynote at OSCON 2002, Lawrence Lessig talked about the "free culture" and the way "creativity and innovation always build on the past". The video is a must see for anyone working with or on Open-Source projects. Even if Lawrence does not talk explicitly about Open-Source in the first part of his talk, his arguments are still valid for Open-Source projects.

Symfony has been made possible because I was able to have a look at the code of other Open-Source projects. I was able to understand their code and adopt some of their ideas for symfony. Symfony would not have been possible without the work of thousands of developers before us. I get inspiration nearly everyday by reading code written by others in PHP, Python, Ruby, and even Java.

We have bundled third-party Open-Source projects like the Prado I18N librairies or the Propel ORM. We have converted code written in other languages to PHP, like the Ruby on Rails helpers. But most of the time, we have implemented our own solution based on the community experience. This is the case for the new form framework, for which I borrowed a lot of ideas from two Python projects: the Django framework and the formencode library. In symfony 2.0, we will have a Dependency Injection framework, inspired by the Java Spring framework. Instead of reinventing the wheel over and over again, we can build better tools thanks to existing ones.

symfony web debug toolbar

Today, I am happy that our beloved symfony web debug toolbar has been ported to Django. This is the true spirit of Open-Source. In a world of competition, Open-Source projects are all about sharing code and experience.

Thanks to Open-Source, becoming a better developer is quite simple nowadays: read code written by others.

Published in

Help the Symfony project!

As with any Open-Source project, contributing code or documentation is the most common way to help, but we also have a wide range of sponsoring opportunities.

Comments

Avatar of Joshua May
Joshua May said on Sep 23, 2008
Re-inventing the wheel is a massive issue among PHP developers. It's yet another reason why I enjoy symfony's attitude and culture.

It's nice to see it going full circle.
Avatar of Jan Markmann
Jan Markmann said on Sep 23, 2008
It's great to hear about spring inspired dependency injection coming in symfony 2.0.
I honestly believe at that point symfony as the only real Enterprise PHP MVC framework catches up with the technologically leading J2EE MVC solutions.
Keep going, looks like a great future for symfony.
Avatar of CT
CT said on Sep 23, 2008
"Dependency Injection framework, inspired by the Java Spring framework"

This is yet the most exciting feature I've heard from symfony. It's good to hear.
Avatar of Brett
Brett said on Sep 24, 2008
I only barely began watching the Lawrence Lessing video and already have a thought about publishers. For those that have read "Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand, publishers are second-handers. They do not create things on their own. They live off the work of others. This is why the want control. They know they will never be able to create something original and desirable.

That's it. Continue your day.
Avatar of moreilla
moreilla said on Sep 25, 2008
I love the spirit of open source~

Comments are closed.

To ensure that comments stay relevant, they are closed for old posts.