Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian. I thought I’d post this to the Symfony community because we know Symfony can work really well with Zend and I wanted to know what development tools our readers use in their Symfony projects.
What to know what tools Zend use? The Zend team are organising a webinar with Atlassian - looking at the tools they use to speed up their application development life-cycle. Here is the blurb:

Creating a comprehensive unit test suite is an important step towards producing stable, high-quality PHP code. It will also help you set the foundation for using continuous integration, which provides fast feedback about the impact of code changes and can help prevent unexpected project delays.

Join this webinar by Atlassian and Zend to learn about unit testing and continuous integration, and see live demonstrations of how you can quickly adopt both practices using Zend Studio and Atlassian Bamboo.

Zend recently switched their Issue Tracker to JIRA, Source control analytics to Fisheye and Wiki to Confluence. All of these are free tools by Atlassian - if you run an Open Source project.

The Zend team will be sharing on how the use Atlassian Bamboo for continuous integration. You can read more about the Webinar and register here.

In the Symfony world the Doctrine project also runs an Open Source license of JIRA. The Symfony project itself uses Trac, which is also a very popular open source issue tracker.

I’m interested to know - what development tools do you use to speed up your development? (Issue tracking, source control, wikis, continuous builds and integration). How do you find them?

In particular, I’d love to hear if you use continuous integration and builds in your PHP coding. Is this mostly a JAVA or .NET thing or is it taking off in the scripting world as well?

Darren Hoyt and I are looking for some Symfony programmers to answer questions on our new Symfony site.

Darren and I are often asked for help with small programming or design tasks, simple problems that require maybe 5 minutes of our time. Since we do a lot of work with WordPress, we recently built WP Questions, a place where WordPress experts can earn some money by answering people’s emergency questions about WordPress.

Today we are launching Symfony Experts, which is the same kind of site, but aimed at Symfony.

We have a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem when launching these sites, since the experts aren’t interested till their are customers and the customers aren’t interested till their are experts. Still, our preference is to get some experts signed up first, before we start marketing this thing heavily to all programmers working with Symfony. Please consider signing up now. Once we have about 10 good Symfony programmers signed up, we’ll begin marketing the site. It is free to sign up.

The people asking the questions put up prize money for whoever answers them. You can look at WP Questions to see the kinds of money people has so far offered.

More details are here.

For our customers who are paying to ask questions, this tutorial explains how to ask a question.

For our customers who are paying to ask questions, this tutorial explains how to assign prize money to an expert who has answered your question.

We are happy, even eager, to share our revenue with those of you who can send us some users, so we have a variety of affiliate programs.

By the way, next month we will be launching similar sites for MySql and Javascript. And in a bit of what the engineers at Microsoft would call “eat your own dog food” I’ll be posting a bunch of questions on Symfony Experts, to get advice about how to build out our network of sites.

I’m gathering together some web and tech and design people to go out for drinks on December 9th. Give me a shout if you are in New York City and would like an invite. Be sure to include your website or Twitter address, which I’ll pass along to all other invitees.

Contact me at: la @ teamlalala.com

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.

A few weeks ago Symfony nerds launched the 2009 Symfony developers survey. It’s been great to get the communities feedback and today we are happy to publish the results. We had over 250 Symfony developers fill out the Developer Survey which was real exciting to see!.

Some interesting highlights:

Most developers went straight from Symfony 1.0 to 1.2 and skipped 1.1

Propel is the dominant ORM framework, which is interesting in light of the recent announcement that Doctrine will be the default ORM framework in Symfony 1.3 and moving forward.

Ubuntu is by far the most popular platfrom Symfony developers choose to run their applications on

The question with the most evenly spread results is “How long have you been developing Symfony applications for” (see question 6). Indicating the community has a wide range of experience with lots of people under one year experience and many over two years experience.

Most Symfony developers have never developed in another web application framework

jQuery is by far the most popular library used with Symfony

Eclipse PDT is the most popular IDE for Symfony developers

No surprises here: Most Symfony developers are from Europe (which saddens us Aussies - we need more Aussie Symfony developers!)

There were no developers that took the survey indicated they run Symfony applications on Oracle and MSSQL. MySQL was the most popular database used by far.

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2009 Symfony Developers Survey Results


1. What version of Symfony to you currently develop with the most?

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

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There you have it! Did anything surprise you? If you have any suggestions for next years survey, let us know! For those that missed out on filling out the survey, the survey is still open.