On the Liip blog they've taken a look back at the impact that the Symfony project (and related projects) have had on the PHP community and ecosystem.

As we were preparing the news about becoming a [Sensiolabs Silver Partner](https://www.liip.ch/en/news/archive/2015/10/15/liip-now-a-sensiolabs-silver-partner.html), I brought back a bit to the history of Symfony here at Liip. We did do a few symfony v1 projects at Liip but things only really took off with Symfony2. Back in 2009 Fabien came to Zurich to discuss some of the Symfony2 components (still PHP 5.2 compatible at the time) he had just released as well as a few he hadn’t yet released. Jordi, who was working at Liip at the time, and I integrated all of them into our company internal framework over the following months which we later presented at the Symfony Live. This means Liip in fact build the [first Symfony2 framework](http://www.slideshare.net/lsmith77/okapi-meet-symfony-symfony-meet-okapi), even before there was the official Symfony framework.

He goes on to talk about the early days of the Symfony community and the work that was done on several bundles outside of the framework itself. He touches on the Symfony ecosystem and its growth during this time and the influence it has had on the PHP community.

All and all I believe that Symfony has really commoditized the concept of a framework for PHP applications. Reusing an existing framework is now the standard when building new PHP applications. Any project that wants to stay alive will in the long run have to refactor on top of a framework.

In his latest post to the Liip blog Christian Stocker points out that the New Relic extension for HHVM has been updated for the latest versions of HHVM to work a bit more seamlessly.

Since HHVM 3.4 it's theoretically possible to have your own external profiler for function level profiling (like xhprof or xdebug) without having to recompile HHVM itself. Unfortunately it wasn't perfect (or I couldn't make it running), but there's a patch in the master branch now (the upcoming 3.6), which seems to solve that problem. So I worked a little bit on my extension in the last few days and I adjusted a lot of things and improved some other stuff.

He talks about the improvements New Relic has made on their functionality and some slowness that still exists in the "hotprofiler". He points out, however, that if you just want overall statistics and not specific, method level ones, you don't really even need to use it. He offers a word of caution when using his extension and when it may fall back to "userland level profiling" instead.

On the Liip blog today there's a write up from David Buchmann about the just-passed Symfony Live conference that happened in Paris. his recap covers some of the high points of the event including sessions from the Liip-ers in the crowd.

Last week, there was the Symfony Live conference in Paris. The conference was surprisingly big, about 500 developers came together in the impressing building of Cité Universitaire Internationale. The main topic was of course the upcoming Symfony2 release. We had two days of talks and a hackday on Saturday, and lots of fun every night. The topics are on the conference website, some discussion and slides are on joind.in.

He mentions some of the "state of Symfony2" updates that were mentioned and some of the talks that were given by the Liip employees including ones on the Symfony2 CMF project, RabbitMQ and Symfony2, security and Javascript.

Christian Stocker has pointed out that Liip is hiring, including a position for a PHP/XSLT developer:

With our new office, we have more space, with more space, we can hire more people. Therefore and without further ado, I'll recommend you liip.ch/jobs, if you're looking for an interesting and fulfilling new job in an innovative and fascinating environment.

Details on the PHP position can be found here and info on the others are here: Java/Flash developer, Linux sysadmin and Clerk.