Symfony Live Day 2

For the second day of this Symfony Live, management was easier because everybody knew the place, people coming from far away were less jet-lagged which was better to follow the upcoming sessions! Moreover, for the staff we were, people could fortunately enter the place without queuing because of us!

Sessions began with Lukas and Jordi who described us how they used symfony components like yaml, event dispatcher or request handler out of symfony. Beyond the pure usage, they described how they managed the integration inside the Okapi project and how they contributed to enhance the yaml component for example.

Then, Xavier made his best to present how to optimize PHP code. The session was fully understandable and based on the use of tools PHP developers would use more often to be sure they optimize what is valuable. On the top of that, he described the common things he learned during his investigations.

Right after the pause, everybody took a deep breath to dive in GIT world for a while. GIT is not so simple to use but, maybe thanks to Scott, I have been impressed by the simplicity over possibilities GIT provides. For us being attendees on Thursday at the one-day-GIT training, he definitely convinced us GIT usage is really made to help us along everyday-code-management tasks.

The following presentation was made by Matthew from Zend. His talk was first showing how it is easy to integrate Zend components in symfony. Then, he draw a map of what can be used from Zend framework. After his talk, I think some of us will soon play with the Zend Queues or some services components like the newly stable Zend_GData.

After lunch, Marcos reported how he implemented a symfony-based CMS for a publishing company.

Then Dennis came back on stage to clarify definitely the cases when to use event notifications, what their limits also.

Kris followed to tell us with some examples how it is cool to publish a symfony application to the cloud. He gave then some tricks to manage applications on top of highly distributed architectures. Nice feedbacks about Doctrine multiple connections for read/write split, CDN management and testing clues were happily provided by Kris, sometimes (surprisingly?) based on Zend components...

Then, Alvaro took the microphone to describe how he optimized a symfony application while encountering some high traffic at his company. Along all the issues Alvaro and the team had to cope with, he explained how they investigated and solved them with an impressive list of tools like CouchDB for log management, XHProf to profile the application, Tsung to benchmark it.

Then, Dustin presented the reasons that led Yahoo! to choose symfony. Adapting it to make it become ysymfony, he emphasized the good reasons why they migrated Yahoo Bookmarks, then Answers and Delicious in the end. After the migration presentations, he presented the interesting Yahoo! developper tools of the Yahoo! developper network and how it eases integration of external public data thanks to YQL. Then, Dustin gave some useful tips to help on scaling with PHP/symfony environments.

And to top it all off, Fabien came for the fairly long-awaited presentation of Symfony 2 (beware the capital S of Symfony that time, no way to mix). Still in development, Fabien presented the stable core of Symfony 2 which is Fast as hell ! Not to tease you anymore without giving you anything, the code and a quick tutorial have been published. To begin, we recommend you to visit the new Symfony reloaded site and to follow the tutorial to see how easy it is to develop with Symfony 2.

Videos in high quality will come, don't be disappointed! Of course, you will hear about it more and more during 2010 and be sure it will make some noise!