Symfony Live 2011 - Paris
3 - 4 Mar 2011 at Cité Universitaire Internationale

Seriously, there's got to be a better queue / management strategy.

Was interested in the theory / concept presented, but the technical side seemed too much too quickly, with a significant amount of assumed prior knowledge. Struggled to follow. Doesn't mean the talk wasn't good - with 500 in the audience you can't tick everyones box - but wasn't a highlight for me.

Really good start for sflive2011. Concept and theory heavy, but no bad thing there. Much enjoyed.

Admittedly NIH, so more advertisement/selling was needed in this presentation. As-is, the overview of interfaces and proposed drivers didn't add up to a clear reason for why this should be used over another stable log library (and/or creating new output drivers as needed).

The one unique feature I liked was writing strategies, such as "fingers crossed", but I'm not sure if that's appropriate for production systems (seems more for dev/testing convenience).

Very concise introduction to Redis with a good overview of its common syntax (considering there is so much more that couldn't be covered in 10 minutes). Slides were well-structured, too.

Good discussion around the Vespolina project and how it relates to Symfony2 CMF. Admittedly in need of more organization, so hopefully we follow through on adding Vespolina and CMF to the weekly meeting topics for the #symfony-dev IRC meetings.

Not sure how relevant this comment will be under the flood of 4-star "testing" comments, but I enjoyed this six-person discussion on organizing the Symfony community. Some great ideas were tossed around (setting up bug-hunt days, welcoming new contributors) and it's reassuring to know our community leader is ironing out a master plan :)

Heard a few comments that afternoon that this wasn't really keynote material (unlike the second day's awesome keynote), and I have to agree.

Beyond the unfortunate demo malfunction, I think the reliance on FrameworkExtraBundle and annotations might have done more harm than good in introducing Symfony2 to new and prospective users. Yes, it makes configuration a breeze, but on the outside (without deep explanation) it can appear very much like the magic in Sf1 that we're trying to abandon.

Some of the more interesting topics, such as "parameters.ini" for holding sensitive configuration values, were skipped over in favor of explaining arguably less important issues such as route prefixes and templating annotations.

I was also hoping to hear about AOP (as hinted in the proposal), so the fact that it wasn't covered/mentioned at all was very unfortunate.

As for the remaining overview of the Security component, the concepts presented closely followed Fabien's original introduction during Symfony Day 2010 (in Cologne), but with more technical examples. The above comment is right on in that this stayed very close to the online documentation, but I believe the Twig presentation did as well. That was probably appropriate for the target audience (most were probably seeing this for the first time).

The presentation was well organized, especially considering that Bernhard was significantly refactoring the Form component only a week prior. I think some of the audience Q&A towards the end highlighted some concepts that were ambiguous in the slides (e.g. field inheritance, renderers classes), but that was perhaps to be expected. A lot of this subject matter has yet to be properly documented existed only among scattered mailing list posts beforehand.