Symfony 2.1 plays for PHP developers

The PHP framework Symfony has been updated to version 2.1, a little over a year after the release of Symfony 2.0. The update, comprising over 1,100 pull requests, 3,500 commits and more than 6,000 new unit tests, is accompanied by improved documentation with 3,000 new lines of text.

One of the most worked on components is the Form renderer. Changes include backward-compatibility-breaking modifications in how the Form component handles types and options, themes and HTML, method arguments and attributes. That said, the changes have allowed the developers to remove the need for the bindRequest() method, add custom field constraints, handle choices more easily with an OptionsResolver component, and deliver better error message content. They have also made Symfony 2.0's collection type usable, added support for HTML5's date and datetime fields, and boosted performance for form rendering.

Other changes include the addition of a new Composer component which allows new PHP projects to be quickly and easily set up while managing dependencies, and performance improvements in the Swift Mailer component. Symfony 2.1 is available to download from the project's web site as a .tgz or .zip file; the Symfony Components can also be obtained separately. Symfony is published under the MIT licence.

(djwm)