During The State of Symfony 2 you will learn about the current state of the brand new version of Symfony, scheduled for release late this year. Several important parts of Symfony 2 will be highlighted by prominent speakers. And at the end of the conference, the second Preview Release of Symfony 2 will be published, including updated documentation!

Several guest speakers - including Fabien Potencier and Jonathan Wage - will be talking about the future of the framework and how it will integrate with other technologies (like Doctrine). There's two times you can catch the event - one on June 22nd @ 10am and the other is June 23rd @ 5pm (all times are Central Eurpoean Time). The registration will cost 30 Euro for the normal ticket, 20 for Early Bird (first 50 people to register).

The core of your average web framework is a Front Controller. Front Controllers are commonly considered complex and esoteric. That's a myth. I sometimes brag that I can construct a Front Controller in 15 minutes. Actually, it's doesn't take quite that long. In PHP, a Front Controller can be simplified to just one line of code.

This one line of code, while a very dangerous thing to actually use in an application, illustrates what a front controller does to forward out the request to the rest of the framework. He revises it with a Zend Framework-ish example that splits the request out into a controller/action method.

A long time ago, I wrote a two line hack that let you use Google as a command line calculator. It eventually ended up in the 2nd and 3rd editions of Google Hacks.

The code calls the Google Calculator page and pulls back in the contents, allowing you to pass in any sort of calulation you might want and pass back out the result all cleaned up and parsed out.