To round up a wonderful year of Symfony Live conferences in Paris, London, and San Francisco, we're going to bring our tour to an end in Berlin. Symfony Live Berlin is going to take place this November on the 22nd and 23rd. As an exclusive event location we have chosen the Umweltforum Berlin - an over 100 year old church!

The first day (22nd) will be a day devoted to the "Symfony Ecosystem", things related to the framework and its community but not it directly. The second day (23rd) will be the more specific Symfony-related sessions (the list is here). There'll also be a few other events happening at the same time - a hackathon, the certification exam will be offered and an after-party will be held following the final keynote.

I like to think that most popular frameworks are modular enough, fast enough, well-documented enough; they are using well-known design patterns. So, besides the buzzwords, what is unique to Symfony? Why would you want to use Symfony instead of Z? That's the question I'm going to answer in this post.

Included in his list of plusses in Symfony's favor are things like:

• Symfony is not a framework but a project.
• Symfony enjoys a huge community of users and contributors.
• Symfony embraces the "don't reinvent the wheel" philosophy, and provides tight integration with many other Open-Source projects.
• Symfony tries to bring innovation to PHP

Check out the comments for more reasons from other members of the Symfony community.

Don't worry guys, this isn't another PHP apologist or PHP hater blog. We've all had enough of those recently. This is a quick heads up on two projects that are doing what they can to make the PHP ecosystem a better place.

He talks a bit about some of the recent work that the PHP-FIG has done, the new standards that were approved by the group (PSR-1 & PSR-2) as well as the launch of a dedicated website for the project, complete with a handy FAQ. He also points out the PHP The Right Way site and the loads of community contributions that have come in around it. There's guidelines for things like dependency management, security, testing, deployment and lots more. If you haven't gotten a chance to check out this resource, it's definitely work a look!

The biggest problem of these rants is that they come from people stuck in the old days of PHP. They either don't care or they don't want to admit that PHP actually evolves at a very fast pace, both at the language level but also at the community level. In fact, it evolves much faster than any other language or web platform. It has not always been the case, but the last 5 years have been an amazing journey for PHP.

He points out the usage stats of the general usage of PHP across the web, the sites that use the PHP-based WordPress software and the percentage of use for CMSes like Joomla. He talks about how some of the recent advancements in the language have brought it into its own and three points that have made the language even better - its adoption of git for it's core source code management, the Composer package management system and the collaboration that is happening between projects.

One of my main concerns with PHP has been the lack of ecosystem. Almost all libraries and tools are written with a specific framework in mind, creating separate ecosystems around Drupal, Zend Framework, Midgard and others instead of an ecosystem benefiting all users of the language. There have been efforts at this, like PEAR before, but they have mostly stagnated.

These thoughts were spurred on by a post about the changes happening with eZ components (into Zeta Components) and how they can help reinforce the strength of the language rather than the efforts of one specific project's ecosystem.

We're happy to announce that Andi Gutmans, co-founder of Zend and an active member of the PHP development group, will officially kick off our upcoming php|tek 2008 Conference, which will take place in Chicago, IL, between May 20th and May 23rd, 2008.

His talk will be titled PHP State of the Union: Eco-System and Technology and will take a look at the ever-changing state of the PHP community and a look ahead to possible future developments.