Symfony 2.3 to be maintained for the next three years

Symfony 2.3.0 is the first long-term-support (LTS) release of the PHP framework for web applications since the introduction of a formal release process. Version 2.3 will be maintained for the next three years through to May 2016, after which a new LTS version will be released. There will also be standard releases with new features every six months and these will be maintained for eight months.

Features added in the new version include improvements to the console component. It is now possible, for example, to display tables in the console relatively easily using the TableHelper. It is also possible to request console output in Markdown, JSON or XML format and, for commands that take the verbose flag, to choose between three levels of verbosity.

As far as dependency injection using Symfony is concerned, both synchronised and lazy services are now available. Setting the lazy flag for a service enables its execution to be delayed, whilst synchronous services into which a request has been injected by a setter are called automatically whenever the request changes.

To facilitate subsequent investigation of fatal errors, they are now logged automatically. Symfony 2.3 also includes constraints and validators such as EqualTo, LessThan and GreaterThanOrEqual for performing comparisons. A list of all changes and links to explanatory blog entries can be found in the release announcement.

From version 2.3, the source code for the standard edition and all dependencies will be available under an MIT-like licence. To avoid licensing issues, the development team has removed several packages. Information on upgrading installations that use the framework to the latest release can be found in the relevant document.

(fab)