On symfony 1.2, Jobeet, frameworks and Spore

I've been really busy lately hence it being quiet here. My TODO list has quite a few topics I want to write about, I just need to find the time. So what have I been up to? Mainly Jobeet, work and Spore

So, on december 1 symfony released the stable version 1.2 of it's framework. I've been digging into it and finding some really good stuff in there (such as the RESTful routing, and the Propel routes). But that's not all. A bit before the release, Fabien approached me if I wanted to spend some time in helping him out.

Jobeet

And so I joined the Jobeet team, which contains some key people from the symfony community working together to make Jobeet an excellent tutorial. My task within the team is "svn manager". Basically, aside from proofreading, I run through all tutorials, execute the steps involved, and ensure that the accompanying Subversion repository for the project is kept up-to-date with the changes of each day. 

I quite like this job. Aside from being able to see from applying things how symfony 1.2 is different from previous versions, I also encounter the occasional feature I didn't know existed. 

If you're new to symfony and want to dig into it, or if you're experienced with symfony but have not yet worked with symfony 1.2, feel free to checkout Jobeet. It's a 24-day advent tutorial, so it runs until december 24th, after which it will be available in full working glory for everyone to use as tutorial or reference.

Frameworks

On a frameworks-related note (and since we've also mentioned advent already), I would like to point everyone to an excellent article in the PHPAdvent series. Now really, all of them are worth reading, however I would like to give some special attention to the entry by Paul Jones talking about frameworks. Paul makes some excellent points in this article. 

Spore

Something that is absolutely not related to another PHP is Spore. Sinterklaas was kind enough to bring presents to our house, and even though my kids were spoiled bigtime, I also was able to score a gift. Sinterklaas brought me the computergame Spore. And I must say, it's an excellent game. You're basically doing your own rendition of the evolution, starting as a single-cell organism and making choices on how your organism evolves into an animal (or monster of course), whether it's friendly or hostile, and such. I'm far from finished with the game, so I've probably not seen half of it yet, but it's a great game for sure. If you're still looking for a christmas gift, I would absolutely recommend Spore.