Symfony Live 2012 Paris report

Time for a short (and somewhat late) report about the main event for the Symfony (and PHP) community in Paris and of course for us at Theodo: sfLive, which we sponsored and attended.

SfLive gathered around 600 people this year. On the whole the organization was great, with only one minor issue: the secondary rooms were sometimes a bit too small for the audience. Which is, in a way, a consequence of the success of the event.

In his keynote, Fabien Potencier emphasized the importance of the community revolving around Symfony, and its continuous growth. Concerning Symfony2 news, the first Symfony2 certifications many had been waiting for were announced. Those hoping to hear the announcement of the 2.1 version of Symfony would have to wait some more though (but not too much: the beta version was officially released two weeks later!).

The conferences were globally of high quality, with some nice surprises, particularly in some very loosely Symfony2-related topics like John Clevely’s How we built the new responsive BBC News site, that I luckily attended because its schedule was exchanged with the previous conference. Very informative talk however about the answers they found to the multiplicity of devices connecting to the BBC site. Basically they chose to separate between two categories of users: those with low capacity devices, for whom the core elements will still be available, and the ones for whom an enhanced user experience is possible.
Talks ranged from specific technologies, either Symfony related or not too much (like Jeremy Mikola’s using MongoDB responsibly), to use cases like the BBC’s one or the wetter.de example that dealt with performance issues, cache and ESI, and a bit of good practices (David Zuelke’s Designing HTTP Interfaces and RESTful web services or why most self-called “REST API” are actually, well, just APIs).