The Symfony blog has a reminder for those in the Warsaw, Poland area - save the dates of December 10th through the 14th for this year's SymfonyCon Warsaw.

We're very happy to announce the first SymfonyCon! It will take place in Warsaw, Poland, from December 10th to 14th. Get ready for this upcoming conference! But okay, the SymfonyCon is probably confusing you all, so it's time for a little recap of all the conferences we're organizing all over the world. Thus, starting from this year, the Symfony Live conferences will be now local events, which means that they will be organized for the Symfony Community of the host country. [...] nd here comes the SymfonyCon, which will be an international conference. [...] he first one we're organizing will be held in Europe, and we've chosen Warsaw to organize it!

The conference will be at the Westin hotel with two workshop days and, two days of conference sessions followed by a day of hacking/certification exams. If you want to submit, the Call for Papers is now open until July 31st or you can pick up your early bird tickets for just 199 Euro.

On the Symfony blog today there's a new post from Fabien Potencier talking about the upgrade path to keep your Symfony projects up to date. He points out that in the pre-Composer days it was more difficult, but thanks to this handy tool, it's a much easier task.

In the old Symfony 2.0.x days, at a time when Composer did not exist, upgrading a project from one minor version of Symfony to the next one was not that easy. [...] Fast forward to the Composer world. Composer is used by Symfony since version 2.1, but as we were the very first adopter, and because Composer and the Symfony ecosystem were not stable yet, it was still awkward. [...] Fast forward to Symfony 2.3. As of Symfony 2.3, the minimum stability level has been raised to stable.

This stability means that all of the libraries and tools that Symfony 2.3 depends on are in their "stable" state as well. Included in the post are the commands to update your Symfony install and what it looks like when the update from 2.3.0 to 2.3.1 happens. He finishes off the post with a few recommendations about how to use Composer to keep things stable (use "stable", define version constraints and run the update without fear of breakage).

Igor Wiedler has started up a new project that helps you combine "stacks" of middleware related to the HttpKernelInterface from Symfony as a sort of decorator to its base functionality - Stack.

In the post titled HttpKernel middlewares I brought up the idea of bringing rack middlewares to Symfony2. In order to solidify this effort I would like to announce a new project: Stack. Stack is a convention for composing HttpKernelInterface middlewares. The name and logo are based on the idea of building a stack of middleware layers, each of which handles a particular piece of logic. [...] The main goal of stack is to give the idea of "HttpKernel middlewares" a name, so that we can more easily talk about it.

There's a stackphp organization on Github that has the start of this set of middleware pieces including tools to help you build other features. The project is focused around the Symfony HttpKernelInterface because it was the simpler, more standardized option for now. He notes that there's no reason that, in the future, when things are more standardized it couldn't broaden out to PHP as a whole.

In this new post to the ZFort blog Elena Bizina compares Symfony and Zend Framework from her perspective, looking at things like functionality, general understanding and community.

Zend and Symfony are the two frameworks that are often compared. Which one is more functional? Which one is more preferable in terms of productivity? Which one is better for general understanding? Which of these two has a larger community? I've asked Zfort Group experts to help me with these questions, and here's what we have come to.

She first gives a high-level overview of each framework, pointing out a few of the features and tools they have built-in. She then goes on to answer the questions above, noting that she sees Symfony as coming out in the lead. Some of the questions are a little vague, so it's not entirely clear why one is different than the other. What do you think? Leave a comment here with your opinions.

On the Symfony blog today Fabien Potencier talks about some small things that matter - some of the smaller updates that have been made to the Symfony 2 framework recently that have helped to make it better and more flexible.

Every new Symfony release tries to brings some small but useful improvements. Let's dive into some of them for Symfony 2.3 (in no particular order).

Things in his list include:

• A text-based output of the exception handling stack trace
• A default configuration for the Serializer component
• The ability to run the framework in a production environment in development
• An update to make debugging configuration parameters easier
• Conversion process of short controller names
• Overload generated code in the bundle bootstrapping code

Check out the post for the rest of the changes on his list and check out the RC1 of Symfony 2.3.0 to see some of them in action.

Fabien Potencier (of the Symfony framework) has a new post to his site talking about a philosophy that the Symfony framework community should work towards, providing stability over features.

Long story short: in the coming months, the Symfony core contributors should focus their efforts toward stabilizing the existing features instead of working on new ones. At this point, backward compatibility and stability are more important than everything else.

He highlights some of the points that come along with this effort including less refactoring for the sake of refactoring, fixing more bugs/edge cases and writing more tests/documentation. He gets into some of the specifics of this kind of thinking and points out the things that can and can't be changed during this time. He talks more about stability and suggests that not only can it help enhance performance but it could also help motivate more projects/corporate users to start using the framework.

Gonzalo Ayuso has a new post today showing how he set up queuing with ZeroMQ and Symfony components and React.

Today I'd like to play with ZeroMQ. ZeroMQ is a great tool to work with sockets. I will show you the problem that I want to solve: One web application needs to execute background processes but I need to execute those processes in order. Two users cannot execute one process at the same time. OK, if we face to this problem we can use Gearman. I've written various posts about Gearman (here and here for example). But today I want to play with ZeroMQ.

He uses React and some ZeroMQ bindings and Symfony's Process component to make a simple client and server for working with the queue and processes. A screencast is included in the post showing them making the connection and adding the new process. The full code can be found on github (or installable via Composer)

Daniel Cousineau has posted a guide to using the Symfony Console component as a part of your application. It introduces you to some of the basics of using the component and has plenty of sample code to get you started.

CLI applications are extremely useful for many, if not most web projects. The Symfony framework even goes so far as to include an extensible CLI console used for everything from running cache cleanup/warmup tasks, to user account management. Many CLI scripts for web projects consist of just a static .php file which works fine but grow unweildy over time. Thankfully, the aforementioned Symfony Console component is released as a decoupled standalone that can be installed and setup easily and provide us with structure and organization (and some powerful features).

He walks you through the installation of the component via Composer and includes the code to make a simple CLI script using it. He shows how to make new commands (like his "TestCommand") and how to attach it to the application. He talks about output and input handling with arguments and options. He also shows an integration with an existing application with a base command class that helps to set up and configure the command objects that inherit it.

On the Symfony blog there's a post from Ryan Weaver about an upcoming event the project is hosting and how you can help - the Symfony Docs Hack Day (on March 30th).

The first commit to the Symfony documentation was over 3 years ago, and since then, we've grown to include a full book, lots of cookbook entries, and sections for most of the individual components. [...] But as we grow, we want to stay aggressive and continue to improve the quality of the docs. This means ensuring that code examples are accurate and pages are easy to understand, balancing the info you need with excess technical clutter. [...] And this is where we need your help! Whether you're a seasoned-Symfony veteran, a beginner, or even if you don't think your English is very good, we'd like you to join us on March 30th for our first ever Symfony Docs Hack Day.

The event is a virtual one - everyone will meet up on the Freenode IRC network in the #symfony-docs channel on March 30th from 9am through 5pm Central EU time. Everyone's invited, not just those who are experts in the framework. Documentation updates are a great way to learn more about a framework too! If you're interested in what kind of updates they're looking for, check out this list of open issues with the docs on Github.

In this new post to DZone.com, Giorgio Sironi kicks off a series that looks at reusable components in the PHP development world. In this first post of that series he looks at the Symfony console component .

Symfony is one of the most popular open source PHP frameworks on the market. The Symfony Components, however, are loosely coupled projects that can be reused as a library outside of an application based on Symfony. The component this article explores is Console (symfony/console on Packagist and GitHub), dedicated to quickly build console applications.

He goes on to talk about some of the "pros" of using the component (including built-in argument/input handing and multiple "commands") and some of the "cons" of is use (including its size and some of the built-in features you can't really work around).