PHP West Midlands and Symfony

This Tuesday I broke from my normal evening routine and headed to Harborne to the offices of PSL Connect. I went to investigate PHP West Midlands and to hear a talk on the Symfony Framework by Darren Beale of Siftware. He'd some along to Multipack on Saturday, so it seemed fair to return the favour and do some cross-group networking.

Overall I was very pleased with the excursion.  Darren is an entertaining speaker. The talk was a solid broad-strokes introduction to Symfony, which left me with a flavour of the thing and enough insights to compare it with others (I've a passing familiarity with Cake, Codeigniter and PHP WAX). I do wonder if he shouldn't have mentioned its reputation for being config-file-city early on, as that was one of the things that stuck with me watching the demo. That and a slight concern at its generating of Javascript. Needless to say I'll be adding it to my list of things to experiment with... Right behind IE 8 and the iPhone SDK.

We finished off with a quick pint and general pub chat.

The PHPWM guys seem a friendly bunch (and provided pizza and crisps!) I narrowly avoided purchasing a cuddly elePHPant, which my wife is no doubt happy about, as we have enough tat already.