P'unk Avenue Window

I am liveblogging Fabien Potencier’s Symfony 2.0 presentation. Bear with me and my editorial errors, simplifications and bare-faced libels.

My own opinions are in parentheses.

They are setting up now.

“Symfony 2.0 Reloaded” Preview Release

“I’ve decided to do the session in French” heh

In 10 minutes you will discover the shiny new version of Symfony, Symfony 2.0. Symfony 2 is just awesome. But first a bit of history.

Symfony 1.0 released in January 2007. Started as glue between existing libraries: Mojavi, Propel, Pardo i18n, …

“How many of you are still using 1.0?” [Some hands go up] “Ohhhhh!” [Hey, I raised my hand too, I have to support existing projects after all, heh. Our new stuff is all 1.4]

With Symfony 1.2 in November 2008, decoupled but cohesive components wre rolled out: forms, routing cache, YAML, ORMs… but still the same core.

Symfony 1.4 – November 2009. Added polish on existing features. Removed the support for deprecated features. Current LTS released, maintained until late 2012.

What is Symfony 2.0? The next version of course… except Symfony now takes an ‘S’ instead of an ’s’. That’s the big difference!

Talk about Symfony 2 with a capital S please! Symfony 1 (uppercase) does not make any sense, symfony 2 does not make sense! It’s all about Symfony 2. “I’m quite picky.”

“Same philosophy, just better.” We’ve learned a lot from our mistakes. We’ve learned a lot… we have problems with Symfony 1, but not all are fixable. It requires breaking backwards compatibility. So we need to go forward.

Symfony 2 is still an MVC framework.

It’s probably more of a Fabien-style framework than anything else (his words not mine (: ).

MTV: Model, Template and View?

Highly configurable and extensible. Same Symfony Components (DI, events, request, etc), same great developer tools, full featured.

Everything is upgraded to PHP 5.3. (Great, I hope they debug PHP 5.3 by the time Symfony 2.0 is complete!)

OK, but why a major version # change then?
(more…)

I led a barcamp philly session today titled MAMPCamp: testing websites on your own Mac. You can find considerably expanded slides, notes and links here.

I’ve also promised to deliver a complete writeup on how to use dnsmasq to let coworkers easily view each others’ test sites. More importantly, I’ve promised to deliver Z-CAMP (Zero-Configuration Apache MySQL PHP), a really really easy way to set up and test sites on your Mac. That should be along in a few weeks.

This Friday, Tom and I will be heading to Austin, Texas for SXSW Interactive. As hard as it is to pull myself away from my family, this conference is time well spent. We have started to use it as a milestone for our work at P’unk Avenue and in the Philadelphia tech/geek scene. As in… imagine how many cool things we will do by the time SXSW rolls around next year.

Well, this year has rolled around and I am happy to report that many very cool things have happened. I am also happy to report that Tom and I are heading down with clear missions. Mine is to do a good job on the Regional Whuffie Building: Attracting Innovation to Your City panel. I am looking forward to talking about how Philadelphia is a kick ass place to be right now.

More importantly, though, Tom is looking to bring home the OK Happy Cog’aoke trophy. Some of you may not realize that Tom’s karaoke roots go deep. He has tracked the Philly Karaoke scene for a long time. This will not be an easy task since he will up against competitors from around the world. However, Alex Hillman and Jonathan Finnegan also from Philadelphia could serve to be some of his toughest competition.

If you are going to be there… drop us a line so we can hang out.

And, wish us luck!

This Saturday, BarCamp is coming to Philadelphia, and we are hosting the pre-party on Friday!

BarCamp does not happen in a bar or even a tavern. In fact, we helped to bring it to UArts, a place that P’unk Avenue has a deep history with since four of us are graduates and this company grew out of relationships that began when I was a Multimedia professor there.

BarCamp Philly will take place at The University of the Arts, located in the heart of Center City. The Graphic Design and Multimedia departments have generously donated their classroom space which is equipped with state of the art technology, projectors and in some areas, an intentional focus on openness and collaborative learning. This venue is ideal for the participatory nature of BarCamp.

So what is BarCamp? According to Wikipedia:

…an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

In simplest terms, it is a bottom up conference. Anyone that attends can lead a session on any topic. It allows for the topics to emerge during the course of the event and to take on a life of their own.

We look forward to seeing you at the party.

BarCamp Philadelphia Pre-Party
at P’unk Avenue
1168 E. Passyunk Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19147

November 7, 2008 from 7 to 10 pm.

My brother, Kerry, was hiding in the wings of the Pre-Blog Philadelphia party with his camera. He recently finished everything together into a great little piece.

Good times had by all.

There has been a lot of fantastic coverage of the BlogPhiladelphia (un)conference that just went down last thursday and friday. It almost feels unnecessary to add another. But, here goes…

We had a blast attending this conference. We met some new people, deepened relationships with others, and in general had a great time. There was so much positive energy flowing at the conference and there is even more flowing now as this gathering reverberates through the internet waves.

Philadelphia deserves this attention. As a sincere lover of Philadelphia, I could not be any happier.

Many of us have been preparing for this conference, since we had every intention of making this a special event. We wanted to show off our city, our community and our geekiness, if you will. I think we did a pretty good job of that as Rob Sandie of Viddler made pretty clear.

We are not done. We are going to continue to build this interactive community. Collectively we intend to support innovation and entrepreneurial activity in this region by growing things like Independents Hall. Junto, and LikeMind. There are so many other things going on, it is getting hard to keep up.

A lot of great connections have been made, collaborative projects have started, and most importantly, we are having a lot of fun right now.

At the conference, I had a lot of really sincere and meaningful conversations. At an event like this, you are lucky to have a couple good conversations mixed in with general schmoozing and superficial interactions. This was not the case for me at BlogPhiladelphia. The quality of the banter was just so great. I didn’t feel like I was being sold to or fleeced. There was a sense of sharing the pervaded.

For next year, we would love to see more break-out rooms so there can be even more of this type of activity. We would also love to expand the format to so we can legitimately talk about more than blogs. The open grid sessions opened up the conversation a bit, let’s do that even more next year. We are doing some cool new/social media in Philadelphia and it is not all blogs.

It might be nice to have some keynote type of presenations to compliment the discussions, as well.

I want to thank Annie Heckenberger of GPTMC to have the foresight to get this whole thing rolling and for running a fantastic event. Much kudos to Alex Hillman for being a believer in the Philadelphia media community.

P.S. The pre-BlogPhiladelphia Party at our studio was a blast.