So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, Symfony2

Symfony 2.8 has just been released. It marks the end of the road for the Symfony 2.x series active development and further improvements will be done in the 3.x series from now on. Version 2.8 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release and will be supported for bugfixes until November 2018 and security fixes until the same month of 2019.

In it's over four year life span the components and the accompanying framework have gathered new functionality and continuous stream improvements, but the core principles announced in July 2011 of embracing standards and being decoupled remain unchanged:

Symfony2 embraces standards: First, Symfony2 is willingly centered around the HTTP specification (just have a look at the built-in HTTP reverse proxy). Then, we are embracing the PHP standards: PHPUnit, namespaces, PSR-0 autoloader, ... That makes Symfony2 easily interoperable with many other great PHP libraries.

Symfony2 is decoupled: Beside being a full-stack framework, Symfony2 is also a set of decoupled and cohesive components; Symfony2 is made of 21 components that can be used as standalone libraries: they have their own Git repositories, and they are all available as PEAR packages.

In this time the whole PHP community have adopted the same principles, with PSR-7 and the recent release of Drupal 8 are great examples of this activity. With both HHVM and PHP 7 providing improved performance and new language features, there is excitement in the air - much like there was around the launch time of Symfony2.

As a curiosity, Firefox was in version 5 at that time. Browser versions have obviously gone ballistic since that time :)

From Symfony 2.0 to 2.8

During it's lifetime the framework has enjoyed a total of nine major releases:

In Semantic Versioning lingo the above ones are minor releases, but each one has added more functionality to the framework. As for patches, the LTS version 2.3 made it up to 2.3.35. The above facts are a testament to the Symfony team to deliver on time.

A formidable benchmark for any software team and one of the reasons of why PHP and Symfony are a great platform for product development.

3.0 trims the fat

Together with the the launch of Symfony 2.8 the 3.0 version is launched. Symfony 3.0 contains only minor differences for many new users. 2.8 and 3.0 have feature parity, but 3.0 has some changes to the framework structure and removes deprecated features.

The next feature adding release of Symfony will be 3.1 scheduled for release in May 2016. While that may seem far away, it's worth considering that there are plenty of new and improved functionalities in 2.8 and 3.0, such as:

I'd like to congratulate everyone involved on the effort for another release and hope you have a great time over at SymfonyCon in Paris this week - celebrating the tenth anniversary of the product and the community! And long live Symfony2, until 2019 anyhow :)

Written by Jani Tarvainen on Monday November 30, 2015

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