On the Symfony Finland site there's a new post providing some examples of how the Symfony framework is staying relevant with new technologies and trends that have emerged recently in the web development world.

Symfony2 just turned five years old some months ago. This is an eternity in the web world and you average technology stack has likely grown in complexity since then. In addition to the standard components in LAMP you'll likely be peddling with a number of complementary technologies.

[...] The stability and flexibility have enabled Symfony to take hold also in more conservative industries like travel, where the backend systems are critical. [...] Next let's take a few options that developers of contemporary web applications may choose to adopt in their Symfony full stack framework applications when needed.

The post covers three "in style" technologies and how the Symfony framework (and community) are keeping pace:

• React.js Server Side Rendering with ReactBundle
• GraphQL APIs with the GraphQLBundle
• An Graph Database storage layer using Neo4j over PHP OGM

Each point includes a bit of information about both the technology and the related bundle with plenty of links to other resources and tutorials.

On Reddit.com there's a new post from someone relatively new to PHP wondering what the relevance of benchmarks is in a time when most performant sites use caching (full page or data) to increase their speed.

I was speaking to another PHP developer today who is a lot smarter than me. I was curious about Static Site Generators taking over the future of the web. [He] told me that most of the time, big sites have a cache that people hit. So people don't even have to wait for PHP to be interpreted. This begs the question . . . How are performance metrics relevant for different frameworks, when these sites are being cached anyway?

There's several comments on the post now with a few different opinions like:

• "Most of the benchmarks you'll see are dishonest and/or skewed as they don't paint an accurate picture of what's going on, or how they would be used in the real world."
• "As soon as you start taking too much time to return a page to a user you have a knock-on effect where you develop a queue of other users waiting for their page to be returned as well."
• "So far as performance benchmarks go, the framework and language used in your application becomes redundant once you add a caching layer as the page performance is then limited by what caching layer you use."
• "as a rule of thumb "logged out users see cached content" "logged in users see uncached content""

In a new post to the php|architect blog Marco Tabini asks the developers out there "are IDEs still relevant" in your development practices?

PHP developers are firmly entrenched in two camps: those who use text editors, and those who prefer the added power—at the cost of added complexity—that IDEs bring to the table. What's your take?

He looks at some of the more traditional IDE options - Zend Studio, Komodo, Aptana - but also mentions some of the "hybrids" like TextMate or vim that allow you to interface with other external applications to perform common actions (like FTP or debugging). Be sure to cast your vote on your editor of choice while you're there.