Steve Francia has posted a look at the upcoming version of one of the more popular PHP frameworks out there - Symfony2. It's an introduction to this latest version and with some highlights on what's good and what's still a work in progress.

Symfony2 is the latest brainchild of Fabien Potencier. Essentially he took the excellent advancements brought by PHP 5.3 and combined all the learnings he took away from building Symfony as well as established design patterns and best practices often from the Java world and created a modern web framework. Fully utilizing things like namespaces, closures and late static binding, Symfony2 is an extremely full featured, modular, and crazy fast framework.

He shares a few of his suggestions as to why you should use it including its overall speed, how modular it is, its testibility, the emphasis that's been put on its structure and engineering and the useful tools that come with it. Like all pre-release software, though, there's a few things that are still lacking - the fact that it's too customizable (too many methods to do the same thing) and that it's still a "work in progress" with the planned release next month (March) and things still changing pretty radically.