The Day Camp 4 Developers online "conference" has officially announced their latest event, "Debugging Beyond var_dump()", happening Friday September 18th from 9am through 3pm (CST). This time around they're putting it on with the help of the fine folks at php[architect] too.

This latest edition of the excellent event features several well known speakers talking about debugging tips and sharing tools that can make you a more effective developer:

• "PHP Profiling, an Introduction" (Fabien Potencier)
• "Debugging: Past, Present and Future" (Derick Rethans)
• "Characterization Testing for Legacy Applications" (Paul M. Jones)
• "Modern Tools for API Debugging and Testing" (Neil Mansilla)
• "Don't Reboot, Debug!" (Joshua Thijssen)

Much like it's siblings, the Day Camp 4 Developers event is completely virtual and is held via a webcast. Tickets will soon be sale and, compared to the usual cost of a conference ticket, are quite cheap. There's even group tickets available if you'd like to hold a "watch party" in your office.

Check out the Day Camp 4 Developers site for more information or to pick up your tickets!

Fabien Potencier has a new post to his site talking about a milestone for the PHP-CS Fixer tool (used to fix code to be compliant to the PSR-1 & PSR-2 standards) - a full, stable 1.0 release.

A few years ago, I wrote a small script to automatically fix some common coding standard mistakes people made in Symfony pull requests. It was after I got bored about all the comments people made on pull requests to ask contributors to fix their coding standards. [...] After a while, I decided to Open-Source the tool, like I do with almost all the code I write. [...] To my surprise, people started to use it on their own code, found bugs, found edge cases, added more fixers, and soon enough, we all realise that using regular expressions for such things is doomed to fail.

In recent months the tool has undergone a rewrite to work with the tokens instead of regular expressions (lead by Dariusz Ruminski) and the 1.0 release of this updated version has been made:

After 13,000 additions and 5,000 deletions, I'm very proud to announce version 1.0 of PHP-CS-Fixer; it is smarter, it is more robust, and it has more fixers. Any downsides? Yes, speed; the tool is much slower, but it is worth it and enabling the new cache layer helps a lot.

On the Symfony blog today they've officially announced the Symfony Best Practices initiative that's being ramped up to help provide a solid resource for Symfony developers and guide them towards more correct development within the framework (and its components).

Since the publication of Symfony 2.0, the Symfony Community has created an unofficial set of recommendations for developing Symfony2 applications. Unfortunately, a lot of these recommendations are in fact wrong. They unnecessarily overcomplicate things and don't follow the original pragmatic philosophy of Symfony.

This guide, soon to be published at http://symfony.com/best-practices will share 31 of the best practices gathered by Fabien Potencier, Ryan Weaver and Javier Eguiluz from their own experience and the practices the community has found along the way. The things in this guide will be optional, not required, to make Symfony-based applications work, so don't worry if you're not following them exactly.

On PHPMaster.com today there's new tutorial showing how you can enforce compliance with the PSR standards in your application's code with the help of the Jenkins continuous integration tool.

Though it’s still early to guarantee that the PSRs will be widely adopted as the de facto standard for writing serious PHP applications, it is interesting to note that a code sniffer and fixer that looks for code deviations was developed by nobody less than Fabien Potencier, the creator of the Symfony framework. (Et bien, ils ne sont pas fous, ces français!) In the rest of the article we shall find out what his PHP-CS-Fixer does and how can it be integrated with a CI tool like Jenkins.

He shows how to install a tool that can help you keep your source in compliance - the "fixer" (created by Fabien Potencier) to help correct the problems found in your code. He includes the command line calls you'll need to run the tool on your code and how to add the step to your build.

Kevin Schroeder has posted a podcast from last year's Zend/PHP Conference (2010) - Fabien Potencier's session covering dependency injection.

This session introduced one of the less-known design patterns in the PHP world, but also one that can greatly improve the decoupling and the testability of your code: Dependency Injection. I will demonstrate how to use Dependency Injection in your projects, and I will take advantage of the PHP 5.3 new features to create a fully-featured DI container live.

Included in the post are links to the slides for the talk as well as the link to download the mp3 directly.

Been wanting to give direct feedback to the folks behind the Symfony project, but feel like maybe your tweets and emails are just getting lost in the shuffle? Fabien Potencier has an alternative you can try - send him a postcard!

As a lead developer of Symfony, I need feedback. Symfony being an Open-Source project, there is no way I can know how many people are using it, who they are and what they do with it. That's fine and all, but sometimes, that would really help me to know the Symfony user base a bit more.

If you either just like the framework or use it in your projects, think about sending him a postcard of appreciation. His address(es) are included in the post.

In the spirit of making the most out of the room you have Fererico Cargnelutti has pointed out a framework in a tweet (on Twitter) with some of the new PHP 5.3 additions - Twitto.

Twitto is the smallest and fastest PHP Web framework, and the first one to use the newest features of PHP 5.3. Packed in less than 140 characters, it fits in a tweet! Despite its size, Twitto is bundled with a default controller, is E_STRICT compliant, and generates an error if you try to access a controller that does not exist.

It was developed by Fabien Potencier (of symfony framework fame) as a part of the 140 Characters Webapp Challenge

Dave Dash has posted his own summary about a recent PHP-related conference that happened in Amersfoort - SymfonyCamp.

He talks about some of the presentations given, the other conference attendees, Fabien Potencier's Symfony 2.0 talk, his own talk on the Zend Search Lucene component and the "clean up" project they spent a day working on.

You can also check out Fabien's overview of the event (with more photos) for a different perspective.

Dave Dash has posted his own summary about a recent PHP-related conference that happened in Amersfoort - SymfonyCamp.

He talks about some of the presentations given, the other conference attendees, Fabien Potencier's Symfony 2.0 talk, his own talk on the Zend Search Lucene component and the "clean up" project they spent a day working on.

You can also check out Fabien's overview of the event (with more photos) for a different perspective.

The Zend Developer Zone has posted an interview with the two authors of one of APress' latest releases, "The Definitive Guide to symfony" - Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier.

Frameworks are everywhere in the PHP community these days. Different frameworks fill different needs and have different personalities behind them. Recently I had the opportunity to talk with Francois Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier, the driving forces behind the symfony framework. Not too long ago, symfony released their 1.0 milestone version. They have also released their extensive documentation in print from Apress, as well as on the web.

The questions range from the usual "how did you get started with PHP" out to questions about the book, about the framework, and about the documentation surrounding both.