So thanks to the sponsorship of Liip we managed to get quite a few people from outside of Switzerland for some pretty exciting meetings to Zurich for FrOSCamp. Plenty of Liipers were also present. On Friday we sat together to learn and talk about Symfony2 CMF. On Saturday we split up in two teams, one working on the JCR client library Jackalope and the other starting with adding CouchDB support to Doctrine2.

Thanks to David Nüschler we learned a lot about JCR in general. Its pretty awesome having the lead of the JCR specification as the presenter. Karsten Dambekalns brought us up to speed with how the Flow3 guys are using JCR. Of course after digesting this info we then talked about how to best apply JCR to the Symfony2 CMF project. We also used the time to talk about the next steps for the development of Symfony2 CMF, like development methodology, how to split up the work and priorities. You can read the notes here. Fellow Liiper Pierre also recorded a podcast with Thibault and myself which will hopefully soon get published. As you can see in the notes we have some todo items assigned to ourselves. I have already send out a mail about having an in person meeting the day after Symfony Day Cologne, which looks like it will work out. I will soon publish some more details about the resource planning we are doing at Liip, inviting other interested parties to also share a bit their plans.

From my github dashboard I saw that the Jackalope guys were quite productive. I however was on the team that worked on the CouchDB support for Doctrine. We spend about 90 minutes brainstorming how to best approach this, especially where we will see differences to the ORM and the MongoDB ODM. Benjamin did a great job taking notes. Then we started hacking. Kore started refactoring PHPillow, while Benjamin started setting up the core infrastructure. After some lunch Pizza in the sun, we continued hacking for a bit. I stepped out for about an hour to record the podcast.

When I came back Nils and fellow phpBB hacker Igor were hacking on adding the proxy class support and Kore was working on the view that would enable the lazy loading. With Benjamin's instructions I ported over the persister structure from the ORM. I think after about 4 hours of hacking we finally got to the point where Benjamin and I were able to load up a document from CouchDB. While we were doing some more tweaks, Kore added the view definition to the README and Nils committed his proxy support. I think it was around 20:00 when we noticed that we were the last people still there. So we decided to move things over to an Irish Pub in Niederdorf were we chatted about coding, venture capital vultures and sports until my recently operated knee started to tell me it was time to go home.

Lots of fun, really like this style of conference much better than sitting in sessions looking at pretty pictures and skimming the surface of stuff.

UPDATE 2010/09/22: Add link to the podcast.

Really sounds like an amazing event. Hope you will host another instance and I can make it to come around.

Yeah, lets see how things develop. But in general Zurich is an awesome place for meet ups, because many people can reach it by train and for the few that need to fly, there are good affordable connections too.

Oh and I also failed to mention the party on Friday evening with live music, though I ended up standing at the back entrance with a bunch of Liipers talking about .. not really sure what we were talking about ;-)

Yeah, sounds good! :) I need to attend also next time.

Also congrats on the progress you guys made! How ready is it?