In this edition, I talked with Stefan Koopmanschap (@skoop) the co-founder of the Dutch PHP usergroup PFZ.nl which is merged with the PHPBelgium usergroup to form the PHPBenelux usergroup. He is also an official Sensio training partner for Benelux and Germany. [...] Koopmanschap is much involved in the OpenSource world and is a very highly respected member in the PHP Community; he advocates sensible thoughts and never fails to make his point stand out in the best way he can. You can read more about him on his personal blog - LeftOnTheWeb.

Stefan answers a few questions about himself and his experience with PHP:

• A bit of background on who he is and when he got started with PHP
• How he got started with the language
• His opinion of PHP now versus when he first started
• some of the good and bad things about PHP

You can read interviews with other PHP community members here.

Mocking objects in unit tests is pretty straightforward as every object used in a test case is usually created in a scope of one test class. In functional tests it's a bit harder since we either don't have full control over objects being created or it's simply too laborious to mock half the framework. [...] We're getting the service from a container [in the example] and calling a method which should send a lead. The problem is we don't want to actually call an API while executing Behat scenarios.

Rather than hitting up the API for each test, he opts to create mock objects and results with the tools Mockery has to offer. He gives code for a "is API available" method that either returns a valid container or a mocked object, depending on how it was called.

A friend of mine who is a big supporter of Symfony told me to give Symfony1 a shot. Off course I was skeptical since I knew less about symfony1 than I did on Zend_Tool. That, plus the fact we needed to autoload, bootstrap and get two frameworks up and running simultaneously. What could possibly go wrong! Conclusion: I've got my tool up and running about a 45 minutes later...

He talks about the process he went through to download, setup and configure the framework and start using a "task" to create a simple executable script. He also briefly compares Symfony1 to Symfony2, noting that SF2 is a bit more "out-out-of-the-box friendly" than SF1. The overall experience was a positive one, though. You can find out more about Symfony1 here and Symfony2 here.

A while ago, Fabien asked me to have a look at porting one of Twig's slowest methods, TwigTemplate::getAttribute(), into a PHP extension. It is a complex method that does a lot of different checks and look-ups. Fabien's benchmarks showed that this method was responsible for quite a large amount of time. On top of that, it didn't seem that it could be optimised any further as PHP code itself.

He points to the twig-ext extension that's a reworked version of the "getAttribute" method from the tool and the performance gain (about 15%) it gives. Compiled templates will automatically call this new method in the extension. This update has already been merged into the main Twig repo.

To celebrate our 1000th user on SensioLabs Connect in a week, we have just rolled out a new version that takes into account some of the feedback we had from the community after the launch.

Changes include updates to use Gravatar images if you choose not to upload a photo, fixes for a bug with email confirmations and a few new badges added to the system - "first 100 users", "attendees of SymfonyLive" and ones based on seniority in the community. A public API is in the works, but you can grab a profile in json by adding ".json" to the end of a profile URL (like Fabien's).

When I say "community", I'm not talking about just the Symfony community, but I'm talking about all the people that are part of a larger ecosystem that makes Symfony better. [...] The corner stone of such a system is a unique account where all information are gathered and aggregated. We already have such a system on symfony-project.org but it is quite limited as it is only used for authentication.

Related to this goal, they've introduced SenseioLabs Connect, a site for tracking accounts "on steroids" and the Symfony Community Awards that lets you nominate individuals for awards like "Best Blogger", "Best Support in the Forum" and "Best Evangelist". Voting is open and will run until December 24th with the winners announced in January 2012.

symfony1 is well and alive and many developers are now using it for projects hosted on Git. But as the official symfony 1 repository is hosted on Subversion, it's not always easy to get things versioned easily. As of today, this becomes much more easier. If you are using Git and symfony1, you can now use the official symfony1 Git clone.

There are branches for each of the major 1.x releases as well as tags for some of the minor releases. You can, of course, still access the latest packages directly via the symfony website.

If you've been watching the PHP weather vane (we call it Twitter for short), you may have noticed a shift in Symfony and Zend Framework. Version 2.0 of both web application frameworks feature Dependency Injection Containers (DICs) as the primary means of creating the objects (and even Controllers) your application will use. This is an interesting shift in a programming language that often stubbornly evaded adopting DICs to any great extent.

He introduces dependency injection (DI) as a method for "injecting" objects and configurations into other interfaces without any specific kind of relation between the two. Part of several DI implementations is a container that does some of the magic object creation for you. He applies this concept to a Zend Framework structure and talks briefly about why these containers are "the devil" because they (usually) add complexity where none is needed. He points out one container library, Pimple, that gets it right in his opinion - defining object creation as closures. In the next part of the series, he'll compare the Zend Framework's DI setup against Pimple (and Symfony's) implementations.

Registration is free! The main topic of the conference will be Symfony2 and all related aspects. The schedule, however, is not fully determined yet. If you have something interesting to present, then submit your proposal here.

You can find out more about the event from its main website or our own summary.

Only one month to go: for the third time, the Symfony Day will take place in Cologne. 2011 is without a doubt an important year for our favorite framework: Symfony Live Events took place in San Francisco and Paris. A stable release of Symfony2 has been available since summer, and next month, on October 21st 2011, another Symfony Day will bring the community together at Cologne Mediapark.

For more information on the event including a map to the location, information on the speakers presenting and how to register, visit the event's website. The cost for a conference-only ticket is 129 Euro and a conference+workshop ticket comes in just under 250 Euro (only the "Security", "Build-Your-Own Framework" and "High Performance" workshops still available).