We are coming up on vacation time for Symfony Station, at the end of which we’ll attend SymfonyCon! In this article, we’ll preview the conference and what we are looking forward to. Any opinions will be in bold.

The 8th edition of the SymfonyCon conference is titled SymfonyCon Disneyland Paris 2022. This year it’s at Disney's new Hotel New York - Art of Marvel. And it is the first post-Covid in-person SymfonyCon.

If you are attending in person and would like to meet up for wine, beer, tea, or coffee, DM us on Twitter.

Like most tech conferences, SymfonyCon consists of workshops and presentations:

• November 15-16, 2022: 2 days of pre-conference workshops at Disney's Newport Bay Club
• November 17-18, 2022: 2 days of the conference at the Disney's Hotel New York - Art of Marvel

There’s also a conference party at Walt Disney Studios Park. On Thursday evening, November 17th, from 8 pm to 11:30 pm, a special moment will take place. Walt Disney Studios Park will only be open for SymfonyCon attendees!

Having worked at the Six Flags amusement park in my youth, I can tell you these special open-just-for-you windows are great fun.

If you are wavering on attending, this should put you over the top.

Who Symfony recommends the conference to

Symfony Developers - All levels of experience and knowledge are welcome. That’s a given.

Symfony Newcomers - To learn about Symfony and how it will positively impact their everyday life. If you can afford it, this is the way to do it.

PHP developers - Eager to widen their knowledge of frameworks, best practices, and quality PHP development. I would say more so the latest developments.

Drupal developers - Looking to learn more about the Symfony components used by Drupal (C’est moi, maintenant)

IT Professionals - Development managers, DevOps, and other professionals with an interest in learning more about Symfony. And Platform.sh.

Why you should attend Symfony Conferences

• Meet in real-life the people from the Symfony community you’re working with / talking to online the rest of the year. Oui.
• Network with the community. Oui.
• Discover the latest news about Symfony in prime time. Okay.
• Ask all the questions you have about Symfony/PHP to the Symfony Core Team. Oui.
• Have fun in an inclusive and friendly environment in a bright city! Oui, oui, oui mes amies.

Workshops

We will be enjoying extra days in Paris rather than attending the workshops. But if I were attending them, I would select:

Building Modular and Interactive Applications with Symfony UX

Led by SymfonyCast’s irrepressible Ryan Weaver, the user experience workshop has this description:

“Building great User Experiences with JavaScript is difficult. It takes time to choose reliable packages, configure them, integrate them into your pages, and make your front-end code interact with the rest of your infrastructure.

In December 2020, Symfony unveiled a tool that helps in these regards: Symfony UX. This workshop will introduce you to Symfony UX and the tools it relies on: Webpack Encore, Stimulus, Jest, and Testing Library.

We will discover how to build modular and interactive interfaces using small reusable JavaScript components that can be easily tested automatically.

We will also discover how to rely on Symfony UX and Swup to build advanced User Experiences using the micro-frontends approach.

Finally, we will discuss a little bit about React and how it can be used inside of your Symfony UX applications to increase even more its capabilities.”

Advanced Security with Symfony

Lead by Andreas Huck, the security workshop is described thus:

“The Symfony Security Component is an important tool in many web applications. Symfony 6 has seen an overhauled authenticator system providing a base both for out-of-the-box authentication mechanisms and extensions points for customizations.

The workshop kicks off with an overview of the authenticator mechanism, how it works in a classic form authentication, and how to build your own authenticator to support simple JWT auth.

We also touch on some points that sometimes get swept under the rug when first learning about the security layer: CSRF protection, protection from timing attacks, etc.

In the second part, we will talk about two-factor authentication in Symfony. The topic will include the theoretical background of how things like OTP in general and TOTP work, and how to practically use them in Symfony using and customizing existing libraries.”

Conference Sessions

There is a simultaneous event mingling with SymfonyCon. It is Platform.sh’s Build Anything Together. Platform.sh is Symfony’s official PaaS provider. So they go together like bees and honey.

The conference has some great presentations lined up.

Build Anything Together features an equally strong line-up.

I will be attending a mix of the two events’ sessions. I am primarily a front-end developer who relies on platforms for my backends. So, that will determine what I select for live viewing when there are simultaneous sessions that draw my interest. I will catch what I miss via online replays. You can purchase access to these after the event. Use the links above to see all the presentations.

Nine (9) sessions I am looking forward to

The keynote by founder Fabien Potencier should feature where the platform is going in the future. It will be a great way to kick off the conference.

The From Monolith to Decoupled: Wait, Why is That One Getting Bigger presentation has this description:

“Monolithic apps are getting broken down left and right into dedicated services and teams, all under the banners of separating concerns, higher efficiency, and more. The strategy that is implemented will be crucial to ensure decoupling is a beacon of efficiency and not a migration nightmare.

In this talk, we’ll discuss how decoupling following the strangler fig approach will seem counter-intuitive as your monolith continues to grow alongside your new decoupled architecture.

But this approach, when done right, makes dismantling a monolith a process that is structured and safe, slow but agile, and without major service interruptions or massive interface changes that shock and discombobulate users.

We will look at the experience of Platform.sh’s customer experience engineering team, who are midstream on moving from a monolith to a decoupled suite of microservices that support every aspect of user interaction with our products.”

Next year we will be incorporating Symfony into our WordPress Mobile Atom Media site. I hope to pick up some good pointers in this presentation.

Led by Symfony legend Nickolas Grekas, Unleashing the Power of Lazy Objects in PHP is described thus:

“Lazy objects are a bit magical. They are created empty and populate themselves on demand. They are useful when an object is heavy to instantiate but is not always used, like, for example, Doctrine entities or Symfony lazy services.

But do you know how they work internally? In this talk, I'll tell you about the mechanisms provided by PHP to enable such use cases 🧙.

Because doing this sort of wizardry is not common practice, I'll also introduce you to two new traits that package those lazy-loading behaviors introduced in Symfony 6.2: one for virtual inheritance proxies and one for ghost objects 👻.

While lazy objects used to require complex code generation, these new traits make it way easier to leverage them, opening up possible innovations; lazy arguments, lazy properties, or by-design lazy classes, to name a few.

What will you come up with? Let me know after you've seen this talk!”

Lazy loading is always a good thing for performance.

Pauline Vos’s Advanced Git Magic presentation has this description:

“You know your local from your origin, your push from your pull, your merge from your rebase. But Git is still a mystery sometimes. Making mistakes is scary. What the $^@#! is a detached HEAD state? How do you get out of it? This and more mythical Git beasts will be discovered and tamed in this tutorial.

Even advanced Git users will leave this tutorial with new skills. You’ll be force-pushing, hard resetting, and auto-bisecting like nobody’s business. What’s more: you’ll be confident, comfortable, and love doing it!”

As someone who is extremely Git-challenged despite coding Bootcamp, this is a must.

Symfony and Hotwire, an Efficient Combo to Quickly Develop Complex Applications is described thus:

“In December 2020, Basecamp released their first official version of the Hotwire suite. Combining the historic Turbolinks library with their Stimulus JS micro-framework, it is a powerful combo for making complex applications while coding a full-stack Rails app.

The Symfony team was quick to port the project to their ecosystem, and the results are amazing!

At Windoo we've been using the package symfony/ux-turbo suite since early 2021 to progressively replace our React legacy code. (Yes!) We've learned a lot about how to use it, the good practices to follow, the mistakes to avoid, and the tricky use cases to solve.

Forms, messaging, modals, asynchronous... I will show you very concrete applications of this library in your projects!”

I love this approach, and we have written about it extensively. I’m looking forward to learning more.

Led by API Platform legend Kévin Dunglas, FrakenPHP: a Modern Application Server for Symfony Apps has this description:

”FrankenPHP is a modern application server for PHP built in Go. FrankenPHP gives superpowers to your PHP apps: Early Hints, worker mode, real-time capabilities, automatic HTTPS, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3 support.

How does Symfony fit with FrankenPHP? What benefits does it bring to the Symfony ecosystem?

Symfony Runtime, Symfony HttpFoundation, Symfony Mercure, Symfony Local Web Server... let's see how the Symfony ecosystem can leverage FrankenPHP for the sake of performance and simplicity!

FrankenPHP has received a lot of hype, but I think it will be justified. This sounds fantastic.

Decoupling an Application with Symfony Messenger is described thus:

“Quick response times are crucial. Time-consuming tasks triggered in web requests should be executed asynchronously, if at all possible. In this talk, I will give a short overview of message queues and then show a case study of how we split up an application into smaller services and how we use message queues to coordinate the services.”

Again speed is good.

How to Handle Content Editing in Symfony](https://live.symfony.com/2022-paris-con/schedule#how-to-handle-content-editing-in-symfony has this description:

“Content editing is the process of letting users create rich content directly from your project. It goes from allowing users to write simple text comments to letting users write rich documents collaboratively in real time. Due to the inherent risks of displaying user content on your platform, it is a difficult problem to tackle in a secure, scalable, and feature-rich way.

Let's discuss how the HtmlSanitizer component, Symfony UX and Mercure can be used together to build amazing editing experiences for your users.”

As you may know, content is my thing. So, I’m really looking forward to this session.

Ryan Weaver is closing out the conference with The Evolution of Symfony: Now and to the Future. It’s described thus:

“With the release of 6.2, Symfony will contain somewhere near 500 new features from just the past 12 months! Wow!

And while many of these are small, the landscape of how Symfony apps are developed continues to evolve. In this talk, we'll look at some of the most important changes, from new dependency injection attributes to framework-extra bundle features in Symfony, Symfony UX, testing, and more!

Basically, it’s a quick catch-up on 12 months, thousands of commits, and hundreds of releases across numerous repositories. Let's go!”

Let’s do.

Thank the sponsors

If you have the privilege of being able to attend a live conference, please thank the sponsors. They make it possible. And it goes without saying that you should give them your patronage whenever possible. If you use Symfony, you should do so in any event.

And if you attend SymfonyCon in person, be sure to thank the Symfony and Platform.sh teams.

I hope you have enjoyed this targeted preview of SymfonyCon Disneyland Paris 2022. To quote The Replacements, I Can’t Hardly Wait.

Again, if you are attending and would like to recontrer pour un bier, vin, the’ ou cafe’, DM us on Twitter.

Look for a review article from us in about six weeks.

Bonjour et see you in Paris!