Medieval Programming

Good morning, on Friday and Saturday I attended the symfony['camp'] hosted by Dutch Open Projects in their office near Amersfoort NL. There was a business day on Thursday as well, but I feared not so interesting topics (others said I was right with that) and anyway had to give colleagues a RAP demo and do other primary work stuff.

Friday

The day started with a good breakfast followed by a presentation about Symfony 2.0 by Fabien. That was pretty interesting. He put some materials to his blog entry about it. I am not sure if a radical rewrite is the right thing to do. Especially if you are also targeting enterprise customers. I have seen how bad Tapestry reputation is in enterprise matters, because a completely rewritten API from version to version is nothing that business wants to afford.
The fundamental design ideas look right, but a lot of details were still unclear.

Fabien said that he got a fantastic new approach of treating “it” from django project. He said that input is always a request. Output is always a response. And in between your server logic happens.

Sorry to say, but request – response is not a django invented concept in web. Somehow I generally had the feeling that django is Fabien’s favorite framework of the month. Yes, I think it is good to always look around and use ideas of others to improve, but you shouldn’t exclude RoR so drastically (actually the symfony site admits that some ideas come from RoR) and praise django so much.
Fabien himself made a pretty strong minded appearance. I would have liked if he would have stayed like all others overnight in the camp. But of course thats his choice. He surprised me as well with his strong business attitude. well actually not with that, but on the contrary, that somebody who is heading a small-mid size company is daily committing code to the project repository. Both roles he fulfills pretty good.

Afterwards I joined Dave Dash’s presentation about the Zend Lucene Search, which was pretty interesting. I still have to get his source to try it on my own. It really was simple and seemed to work well. Dustin Whittle gave a talk about the YUI library and how to integrate it into symfony which was pretty good as well.

The official part of friday closed with a podium discussion around various topics of symfony. Among them was the all time favorite Doctrine vs Propel.

The inofficial part consisted of a great barbecue and music afterwards. It was called “party” but it was a pretty geeky party. All were sitting around inside and outside in front of their or somebody else’s laptops and doing geek stuff (creating patches, writing own software etc).

Saturday

after a short night the day started again with breakfast to clean the leftovers and with two presentations about symfony plugins and how to write them. The afternoon was originally intended to be a plugin writing contest but that idea was swapped for a better one: contribute to symfony. Various groups were formed to help symfony in one or the other way. An event calendar was created. Business cases for “serious” references were laid out, documentation was translated to dutch, french and german, and the askeet tutorial was updated. Two teams were purging trac; one for the plugins the other where I was part of for symfony core.

We created a process description on how tickets are handled and worked on quite a lot old and new tickets by closing them, categorizing them or by writing appropriate svn patch files for them. I think in overall this was a good day for symfony.

As there were five 50$ gift certificates for the contest winners, and there was no contest, they were given out in a lottery. And what should I say, I was a lucky winner Thank you!