TechStrut

The alpha version of Symfony 1.3 has been released. Improvements in Symfony 1.3 include: performance, forms, mailer and more. In the new version there is a new default mailer based on SwiftMailer 4.1. When a new application is created with the generate:app task, the security settings escaping_strategy and csrf_secret are now enabled by default. When a label is auto-generated from the field name, _id suffixes are now removed. All symfony autoloaders are now case-insensitive. PHP is case-insensitive, now so is symfony. The symfony CLI now attempts to detect the width of your terminal window and formats lines to fit. If detection is not possible the CLI defaults to 78 columns wide. Doctrine is now also the default configured ORM when creating a new project. There are many more changes and new features. Read the complete What’s new in Symfony 1.3 on the Syfomy project web site. The alpha version should not be used on production environments. Symfony 1.3 is scheduled to be released in November 2009.

Just a reminder that Symfony 1.0 maintenance will end in January 2010. After this time there will be no more maintenance patches. If you are planning on migrating — Symfony 1.2 has already been released and Symfony 1.3 is scheduled to be released in November 2009. Both versions will require at least PHP version 5.2.4 so this might also be a good time to upgrade PHP as well.

There is a new Symfony 1.2 Reference Book which is available. The book is written by Symfony pioneer Fabien Potencier and was published in May 2009. The book provides a much needed reference for Symfony configuration files. It includes references for the Settings, Factories, Generator YML configuration files and many more. The book also provides a good reference for Symfony events and tasks.

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Hydration is the process used by the Symfony ORM to populate objects with the results of a database query. By making a call to the ::doSelect() method on a peer class Symfony automatically hydrates the resulting objects.  In Symfony 1.0 the hydration process was slow and it is much faster in Symfony 1.2. Still, in some cases you may want to bypass hydration. Consider a simple example. Suppose we want to get the title of some news articles.

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