A little more than a half year ago I announced my retirement from PHP core. Since then I have directed my focus elsewhere like Symfony2 and not the CMF project. I do not regret the decision. The main reason to step down was that it was just a too taxing up hill battle to move PHP towards a more open and transparent development process against the inner circle who preferred things to stay as they were back when PHP was by far not as popular or relied upon. This is what I had to say back then:

Since about 4 weeks I have really started using Symfony2, in development for a work project no less. Kinda crazy seeing its still in pre-alpha phase, but I think its a great platform today and I know its going to be the best soon aka once we have a stable release. But in these 4 weeks quite a few things have popped up that I like to see addressed. Most things aren't really about writing code, but figuring out how things should be. The kind of stuff that is hard to fix on your own. At the same time there are not yet that many people to collaborate with, so I think I will have to accept that not all things will get an answer right here, right now. Also a lot of it is pondering best practices, aka documentation. To keep an overview I figured I should make a little list, since right now I just have a ton of flagged emails. Also I might entice some people to follow up on stuff on my list at the same time.

So the current project I am working on at Liip is based on Symfony2. The first sprint went surprisingly smooth. The second sprint we are currently in now "fixed" this growing perception that this pre alpha code just might be stable already. Anyway, we knew what we were getting into but still felt it was the best way to go, no regrets. The main source of trouble is the fact that we wanted to make use of DoctrineUserBundle, but load the views via JSON. Unfortunately right now there are quite a few issues with taking a 3rd party Bundle which wasn't specifically build to be accessible via JSON. So in the end I build a MultiplexController that can JSON-ify any controller. The name derives from the fact that it also supports calling multiple routes at once and returning all the data from all these routes in one request.

So I heard rumors that one of the teams at Liip was struggling with the performance of a symfony app, which was casting doubt on symfony in general. Now that team solved their performance issues by using a filter to do some aggressive caching. This fit nicely in the content workflow anyway since updates do not come in all the frequently anyway. So they just cache everything and added a feature to prime the caches for content changes. Problem solved, but doubts remained for other projects. So I wanted to figure out what was going on.

As I blogged recently we started working on CouchDB support on top of the Doctrine2 infrastructure back at FrOSCamp. For me its been a while since I have taken a leading role in the development of an OSS component. Ever since I left PEAR, I have mainly been helping out here and there and with php.net I was doing organizational stuff. So its kinda fun to be back at working on some OSS code with significant contributions in terms of code. There is still a lot of work ahead, so I wouldn't mind a few helping hands, But you may wonder why you should even bother. Like I was in #couchdb on freenode the other day and David asked a fairly legitimate question: "can you enlighten me as to why you'd need an ORM on top of native json object"? In this blog post I will try to explain why it makes sense to add a model based infrastructure underneath a NoSQL database.