On May 30th, Symfony 2.7 was released. This is a big deal for several reasons:
- 2.7 is an LTS release, meaning apps you build on it today will stay backwards compatible and receive security and other fixes for the foreseeable future (3 years). This is the one true choice for new enterprise apps in the making.
- 2.7 has support for PSR-7 which we mentioned in the last newsletter. That means all the frameworks and projects based off of Symfony 2.7 will now support PSR-7, becoming truly interoperable on many more levels. That also includes the fan-favorites: Laravel and Lumen, as well as Silex.
- To get full support for PSR-7, Symfony actually used Zend Framework’s Diactoros, and as Ryan Weaver writes, this guarantees backwards compatibility by allowing easy transformations from traditional Symfony requests and responses to PSR-7 types and back.
Following all this, Laravel 5.1 is scheduled for release on June 9th and it, too, will be an LTS release. Laravel, as we all know, uses Symfony’s HTTP foundations. And since Lumen is built off of Laravel, this means both frameworks instantly become extremely friendly with both Symfony and the various PSR-7 middlewares that’ll undoubtedly start showing up soon.
Along with the acceptance of PSR-7, this whole chain of events is an unprecedented storm of cooperation between large, competing projects and I for one couldn’t be more excited about what this means for the future stability and cleanliness of the PHP ecosystem. 20 years in, PHP 7 is shaping up to be a revolution in many more ways than one.
Happy 20th birthday, PHP!