Just a quick post to make sure everyone is aware of the 1.3 and 1.4 documentation which is now out.

As well as the reference guides you should definitely check out the other stuff on that page including:

• What’s New in Symfony 1.3 & 1.4
• How to upgrade from 1.2 to 1.3 (then switch to 1.4 if desired)
• Info on why there’s two versions being released together and which might be right for you
• Which deprecated features have been removed in 1.4

Well worth spending some time checkout out!

The guys at UI Studio have done a really nice job of publishing http://symfony-check.org .

It’s a simple site that goes through and helps you check if your symfony application is ready for deploymen. Be sure it check it out.

Some interesting highlights:

1.0.* 18%
1.1.* 6%
1.2.* 76%

2.What ORM Layer do you use the most?

Propel 67%
Doctrine 31%
Don’t use ORM 0%
Other 2%

3. Where do you ask your Symfony questions?

People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Official Symfony Forums 65%
Symfony Blogs 23%
Symfony Users Google Group 40%
Symfony IRC Channel 19%
External Training / Consultant 2%
Other 14%

4. What environment do you run most of your Symfony applications on?

Red Hat Linux 6%
Ubuntu 39%
Windows Server 8%
Fedora 3%
CentOS 8%
Mac OS 7%
Other *nix 13%
Other 15%

5. How do you install Symfony?

Pear Install 34%
Source download 21%
SVN checkout 40%
SUSE package 0%
Debian/Ubuntu package 1%
Other 4%

Most popular “other” value: SVN:Externals

6. How long have you been developing Symfony applications for?

< 1 Year 29%
1 Year 23%
2 Years 21%
2+ Years 28%

7. What database do you use the most for your Symfony applications?

MySQL 88%
Oracle 0%
PostgreSQL 10%
MSSQL 0%
DB2 0%
SQLLite 2%
Other 0%

8. Have you (or do you) develop in other PHP Web Application Frameworks?

People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

CakePHP 15%
Zend 30%
Seagull 1%
CodeIgniter 14%
eZ Components 3%
PRADO 2%
Seagull Project 0%
I have not developed in other frameworks 44%
Other 15%

Most popular “other” Smarty & “My Own”/”Custom Built” famework.

9. Largest Symfony application you have built is used by…

less than 50 Users 26%
less than 100 Users 6%
less than 500 Users 17%
less than 1,000 Users 8%
less than 2,000 Users 6%
greater than 2,000 Users 37%

10. What types of application do you mostly build with Symfony?

People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

CRUD Applications 76%
SOA Based Apps (REST, SOAP…) 22%
Integrated applications (mashups with existing systems) 32%
Batch Processing Apps (Heaving focus on Tasks/Batch) 18%
Workflow applications 38%
eCommerce 29%
Other 10%

Popular responses for “other”: Online form-email, Intranets

11. What other popular libraries do you use with Symfony?

People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

Prototype 41%
script.aculo.us 35%
jQuery 77%
jQuery UI 49%
YUI (Yahoo! UI) 12%
Adobe Flex 7%
Other 8%

Popular responses for “other”: ExtJS, MooTools & OpenLayers

12. How do you contribute to the Symfony project?

People may select more than one checkbox, so percentages may add up to more than 100%.

I use Symfony 94%
I am a Symfony Core Developer 3%
I report bugs 39%
I contribute to the symfony-developers group 12%
I answer Symfony questions (IRC, Groups, Forums…) 43%
I blog about Symfony 25%
I am a plugin developer 23%
I contribute to the Symfony Wiki 11%
I contribute to the Symfony code Snippets 8%
Other 5%

Popular responses for “other”: Word of mouth / Sharing experiences with others.

13. What IDE do you use when developing in Symfony?

Eclipse + PDT 34%
Eclipse 3%
NetBeans 18%
Komodo 2%
PHP Designer 0%
NuSphere PHPEd 2%
Zend Studio 10%
PHPEdit 0%
My favourite text editor (Vi, Notepad, EditPlus…) 16%
Other 15%

Popular responses for “other”: Aptana, Coda, Dreamweaver

14. Where do you develop Symfony projects from?

Asia 7%
Africa 2%
North America 14%
South America 6%
Europe 71%
Australia 2%
Antarctica 0%

15. If you had to choose one reason why you use Symfony, what would it be?

Rapid Application Development (Admin Generator…) 27%
Ease of use for front-end development (Ajax, Forms etc..) 9%
Scalable Framework 16%
Standards-based framework 24%
Project Documentation 16%
Quick to get started 4%
Online Community 4%
Training and Enterprise Support 0%
Backed by an organisation 1%

16. If you had to pick one area to improve the Symfony framework - what would it be?

Simplify the Framework 14%
Improve documentation 24%
Additional features to the framework 8%
Further work on the Admin Generator 13%
Interoperability with other frameworks 3%
Improved plugins 16%
Focus on scalability 15%
Other 6%

Popular responses for “other”:
- Lots of responses to stream line the Forms API (multiple ways of doing things), leading to confusion.
- Focus on performance

Here at Symfony nerds we have been really excited to see the uptake of Symfony over the past few years. We thought we would create a Symfony Developers Survey.

The purpose of this survey is to see how developers across the world are using Symfony. What areas of Symfony do you focus the most ? How do you think Symfony can be improved? These are the types of questions we ask. To take the survey, click on the link below.

Take the 2009 Annual Symfony Developers Survey - Click here

Fabian has recently posted a presentation he has given on Symfony 2.0.

The framework has undergone a complete overall making it faster and light-weight. Checkout all the details of Symfony 2.0 here.

If you are defining your schema.yml and have a field that is a decimal value, you will find you will need to somehow pass through the precision (maximum number of digits to the left of the point) and the scale (total number after the decimal point). The documentation for the syntax of this is quite poor.
For all those that want to know, in Symfony 1.0 this is how you would define a decimal:

my_decimal: { type: decimal, size: 8,3 }

For Symfony 1.1+, the Syntax is a bit different:

my_decimal:
      type: decimal
        size:    8
        scale:   3

Where 8 is the precision and 3 is the scale. Hope this helps.

One of the things that might not be clear to Symfony developers is when to use app.yml for your application config and when to use project-level configuration for all your applications.

If your configuration parameter is for all your applications you should place this configuration setting within your config/ProjectConfiguration.class.php (Symfony 1.2.x). This will save you duplicating the config within each app’s app.yml and you only have to specify it once.

Setting up project-level config
You can set project-wide config by editing this file.

....
class ProjectConfiguration extends sfProjectConfiguration
{
  public function setup()
  {
    //In my example below I want to tell my app if it should use a proxy or not 
    sfConfig::set('use_proxy', '1');	//1 = True, 0=False
    $this->enableAllPluginsExcept(array('sfDoctrinePlugin', 'sfCompat10Plugin'));
  }
}

Anything you place in your project-level config can be accessed from any application (or Symfony task) by using the standard sfConfig::get() static method.

Note: You would normally have to get the application context if you want to read an application config within a Symfony Task. In this case, you wouldn’t because the config is set at a project level.

In previous Symfony versions it was quite difficult and painful to link your applications together (eg frontend and backend).

Yesterday the Symfony crew posted a tutorial on how easy it is in Symfony 1.2. In essence, its a simple config change and a change to your sfApplicationConfiguration class.

However, this method does still require an absolute hard-code of your application URL within your class (or you could put it in a config setting in your app.yml and read it off there). Even though it required some hard-coding, it still is much simpler and easier to use than Symfony 1.0 and 1.1 methods.

For more information - check out the Symfony blog post.

Symfony nerds tip: To avoid hard-coding as much as possible, you could in your app.yml define your application URL’s for each environment (eg. DEV, TEST and PROD). Once you have, in your application configuration class (which extends sfApplicationConfiguration), you could read the config variable for your application URL, but automate that via sfConfig::get(’sf_environment’). And depending on what environment you are in, you will select the application URL that corresponds to that environment.

Today Symfony 1.1.7 has been released with 16 bugfixes. It’s important to note that no new features are introduced with these minor releases on a sable branch, meaning your upgrade path should be seamless without any hassles.

The Symfony team have been doing a great job on the documentation of the Symfony framework - thanks guys!. Last year, we put up the Offline Version of Symfony 1.0 and 1.1 books. Recently, we had a request form someone to put up offline doco for Symfony 1.2 as well. So here it is!

• Click here to download the Symfony 1.2 book offline, and the Jobeet Tutorial
  

Hope you enjoy reading this on the train, bus… or wherever you are.

Don’t forget you can always grab a copy of the book online from Amazon.