July 28th, 2011

Symfony 2 is here!

At long last, the first official stable release of Symfony 2 is out. It was worth the wait.

Symfony 2 is an all-new web development framework for PHP. It follows great practices like dependency injection, namespaces, edge side includes and thorough decoupling of components, making it possible to use all of the major components independently of one another. It borrows good ideas from other languages and frameworks, or simply implements existing standard outright, rather than reinventing wheels poorly. We're excited about it, we're grateful to those who built it, and we'll absolutely be using it in the future.

There's one catch: Symfony 2 is a complete rewrite, from the ground up, with no backwards compatibility. This has significant benefits, but it also means a lot of work for those with existing code. Which means that we won't be migrating Apostrophe to Symfony 2 tomorrow. At first it's more likely we'll use Symfony 2 to build standalone web applications as we explore the ramifications of bringing Apostrophe to Symfony 2.

We expect to be able to make more use of high-quality components created by others, such as the Assetic framework for asset management. We look forward to working with these new and improved tools.

Meanwhile, Symfony 1.4 continues to be supported for quite some time to come. The current official end date for Symfony 1.4 support is November 2012, and we anticipate being a part of the community support effort after that. Fixes for truly major security issues continue to be made available even for Symfony 1.0, and Fabien Potencier (the father of Symfony) has mentioned that his own company continues to support Symfony 1.0 sites. So we feel very good about the future of projects begun today on Apostrophe and Symfony 1.4.

Our congratulations to the entire Symfony 2 team, including the extended community of open source contributors who have made it the largest PHP project on github.


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