symfony 1.1 went live just a month or so ago, and in the relatively short history of symfony is somewhat of a revolution. In fact, the shift in a minor version number belies the effort and heartache that seems to have gone into the newer version, and one wonders at the implied major revamp that symfony 2.0 would someday involve. It saw the departure of a key member of the core team, as well as some major changes to the architecture of the framework as outlined in the diagram below.

The great thing about the platform is that being decoupled the classes can be used in isolation, so you can use some features of symfony and not have to use the whole system. In other words, you can build your own custom framework which uses just the bits of symfony that you want.

All this is great stuff, and should help symfony establish a place as the leading PHP MVC framework.

symfony 1.2 is released

But no sooner had 1.1 gone live than we heard that 1.2 is not just in development, but is actually imminent. The current release date is October, which is not very far off. According to the symfony blog, the main (and absolute must-have) feature of 1.2 is a completely revised admin generator system. Other features include bundling Doctrine with the framework and supporting it fully in the same way that Propel currently is. I’m sure a lot of people like using Doctrine, but for me Propel is just fine, and the differences in performance (at least where Propel 1.3 is concerned) are moot (see this blog for a good comparison) 

Worth upgrading to 1.1?

So should I wait for 1.2? I have a couple of live apps running under 1.0. They work just fine as they are, and I see no reason to update those to 1.1 just yet, only to go through the same process again in October. I think I’ll start using 1.1 in a dev environment for getting used to the new architecture, new command line system, etc. Upgrading to Propel 1.3 is also going to be a good idea for the performance gains.

I’m left wondering when symfony 1.3 will be out. Christmas?! Actually, my guess is that now that some of the major architectural changes have been made, things should start to settle down a little. Anyway, it’s great to see such activity in the symfony core development team: evidence that symfony is not just alive and well, but maturing very fast.