phpBB Weekly

Session: Symfony 2 by Fabien Potencier
Date/Time: Friday 8/20 at 11:20 AM-12:10 PM

This post contains my rough crib-notes from this presentation at Libertyvasion 2010. The post has not been proof-read for spelling, grammar, or accuracy.

Fabien has been using phpBB since last week (round of applause), and will be presenting on Symfony 2 and why it’s a good idea to use it for phpBB.

Differences Between Symfony 1 & Symfony 2
“I think it’s like the difference between Subversion and Git.” Even though the name is the same, the framework is really different.
Symfony 1 had the goal of helping developers build applications fast. But Fabien would not advise us to create phpBB on top of Symfony 1. Symfony 2 has been designed from the start to be the best possible platform to create executable applications like phpBB. Designed with speed & flexibility in mind. Symfony 2 also requires PHP 5.3, and leverages all of the great new features in it, such as namespaces.

And we’ve got a Steve Jobs-style demo, showing the composition of the Symfony 2 framework & files. Symfony 2 is divided up into a web/ directory, a source/ directory, and one other directory you can create for the configuration for your application. (This is called hello/ by default, named after the Hello demo application shipped in the Symfony package.)

Symfony provides a developer toolbar on the bottom of the page when in the development environment (not the production environment). A string is set when calling the class to determine which type of environment you’re in, which sets a number of specific configuration settings. Other configuration options can be set up in either XML or PHP.

Once again, I can’t follow along with this very technical demonstration very well, which pretty much was what the entire presentation consists of. You’ll have to wait for the video version of this session to come out to see everything that Fabien is demonstrating.

A couple of questions & answers asked pertaining doing certain things with Symfony 2; probably will be some exchanging of ideas going on during the Development Workshop this afternoon!