Symfony2 turns five, Symfony 3.2 continues the momentum

Late in 2015 the Symfony project as a whole celebrated it's tenth anniversary. Another significant milestone is reached in July 2016 as Symfony2, the second major iteration celebrates it's fifth anniversary. Five years is a long time in IT, but even more so in web development.

Within the web development industry there is a continuous battle between stability and innovation. Stability is required to allow the creation of meaningful solutions to real world problems instead of continous churn of changing the ways of working. Innovation is also required to make sure the platform does not go stale.

Symfony2 was a major rewrite that turned the previous monolithic framework into PHP components as well as a framework to tie these into a coherent framework for developers to build their applications on. Since that Symfony3 was released and was more of an evolutionary release.

While new features are now only added to the 3.x series, the last iteration 2.8 is supported through the LTS program until November of 2019. At this point the framework will have been on the market for over eight years. That's a long time.

Symfony2 in hindsight

Since 2011 the web developers have gone through a large number of trends and technologies. Some novelties have been the widespread use of Web Fonts, Responsive Web Design (RWD), HTML5 and NoSQL hypes and the rebirth of JavaScript. Today these sound just about as fresh as Web 2.0 sounded in back in 2011. Five years ago it was impossible to predict web development trends of 2016.

It would be reasonable to expect that a five year old technology would already be rendered irrelevant. But thanks to the original component based approach, Symfony has being able to evolve and keep up with the times. Looking back at the highlights from the Symfony 2.0 release post, they remain surprisingly relevant today:

Symfony 3.2 to come with new features and improvements to existing components

Five years is a significant time for an Open Source web development technology to remain relevant. Company owners have a built-in vested financial investment for the longevity of their business, but low level software libraries and frameworks are more often a true community effort.

Staying relevant requires constant work and evaluation of what can be thrown away. The Symfony 3.0 release deprecated quite a few functionalities developers had been using. This meant that the last Symfony2 release had feature parity with the first Symfony3 release. Symfony 3.1 was released early this summer with new functionalities such as improvements to Caching.

The next major release of Symfony 3.2 is slated for a release the upcoming November. With this release the development team continues delivering both gradual improvements to core components as well as completely new significant features, striking a balance between stability and innovation.

The Symfony blog has released articles with what is coming in the next iteration of Symfony:

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Saturday July 23, 2016

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