June 10th, 2010

Symfony 2 hub-bub

Symfony is the best framework for building web applications in PHP. The forthcoming Symfony 2 is a dramatic improvement and a complete rewrite with many new features and, even more importantly, better software architecture. Enthusiasts may have heard about the State of Symfony 2 Online Conference to be held on June 23rd. Fabien and the Sensio team have encouraged folks to become "Symfony conference hubs" and invite others to attend the conference from our offices and enjoy the benefits of our lovely projector, coffee, etc. And P'unk Avenue is definitely all about it. Please RSVP by commenting here.

WHAT: Symfony 2 Live Conference WHERE: P'unk Avenue offices, 1168 E. Passyunk Ave, Philadelphia PA WHEN: 11am Wednesday, June 23rd

Thanks to our hub status, You do not have to buy your own Symfony 2 ticket to attend at our office.

We're looking forward to discussion and possibly busting out the Symfony 2 sandbox and experimenting after the conference.
Amid the excitement about Symfony 2, this would be a good time to mention our ongoing support for Symfony 1.4, and by extension Apostrophe 1.x. If Symfony 2.0 is coming, does that mean we're going to abandon Symfony 1.x and Apostrophe 1.x?

No, not by a long shot, not any time soon. Symfony 2 will not be backwards compatible in a "super easy upgrade path" way, which is a valid choice to make improvements that would otherwise be impossible but an obvious problem for existing projects. And we have plenty of those. What's more, Symfony 2 requires PHP 5.3.x at a minimum, and we know how tough it can be to move clients along just to PHP 5.2.x.

Fortunately, Sensio had the wisdom to make Symfony 1.4 a long-term-support release. And since Apostrophe 1.x is happily married to Symfony 1.4, that means we're all in good shape.

Symfony 1.4 is supported until November of 2012, and Apostrophe 1.x will also be supported until at least November of 2012.

At some point, Apostrophe 2.x will come into being and it will be based on Symfony 2, but we have many client and internal projects that are purring away happily on Symfony 1.4 and we have absolutely no interest in abandoning it. So you can very safely pursue client projects based on the current stable releases of Apostrophe.