SymfonyDay Chicago 2025

Symfony in 2025: scaling to zero (Fabien Potencier)

This talk traces the evolution of Symfony over 20 years, highlighting the ongoing efforts to improve the developer experience. From the phasing out of Silex to the introduction of Symfony Flex, and more recent advancements like Symfony UX and update recipes, the goal has always been to simplify development. The presentation also explores innovative approaches to building minimalist Symfony applications, with concrete examples for both web and console applications. Three levels of using Symfony are presented to illustrate the concept: - Symfony Hello: for simple applications and learning purposes. - Symfony Solo: a balance between simplicity and full features. - Symfony Team: the full-featured framework. In conclusion, the talk celebrates the Symfony community and its essential role in building a powerful and user-friendly framework, ending with some thoughts on the impact of LLMs on development.

Quickly Build Your Scalable API Ecosystem (Brent Shaffer, Hector Mendoza)

This talk will look at how to stand up a first class API ecosystem using Symfony and Protocol Buffers. Quickly generate client libraries in any programming language for your customers and incorporate performant RPCs and streams. Specifically, we will show how to: - Define an API using Protobuf and stand up the service using Symfony - Build client libraries in any language using HTTP and JSON as the transport - Use Symfony to serve your API over gRPC for increased performance, and take advantage of gRPC streams

Taming Symfony DependencyInjection (Nicolas Grekas)

Symfony’s DependencyInjection component is one of its most powerful features, but its complexity can feel overwhelming. In this talk, we’ll demystify the beast by exploring the core concepts, common use cases, and best practices for working with Symfony DependencyInjection. From understanding autowiring, autoconfiguration, service containers to advanced topics like compiler passes, this talk will provide practical insights to help you harness its full potential and unlock truly SOLID code.

Frontend Made Easy: Symfony UX for Backend Devs (Andreas Braun)

Tired of wrestling with JavaScript frameworks just to build a decent UI? This talk is your guide to how Symfony UX makes modern, dynamic interfaces attainable—even for backend engineers who’d rather query databases than touch a DOM. We’ll explore how tools like Stimulus.js and Turbo have evolved JavaScript from its clunky early days to elegant simplicity, letting you create exceptional user experiences without the frontend headaches. Perfect for those who prefer their JavaScript in small, digestible doses.

Streamlined JSON: Symfony's JsonEncoder for Modern APIs (Mathias Arlaud)

Serialization plays a vital role in any information system, especially within web applications, as it underpins the HTTP request/response cycle. Symfony 7.3 introduces the JsonEncoder component, a powerful tool for encoding PHP data structures to JSON streams—and back again. Designed for efficiency and scalability, the JsonEncoder is perfect for handling large JSON payloads. Combined with StreamedResponse, it becomes an ideal solution for streaming data in modern APIs. In this talk, we'll dive into how the JsonEncoder, along with the ObjectMapper component (currently in draft), redefines serialization in the Symfony ecosystem.

Building an Automated Trading System with Symfony (Jonathan Wage)

In this talk, we’ll dive into how Symfony powered the development of TradersPost, an automated trading platform, focusing on the tools and techniques that brought the application to life. While Messenger played a crucial role in handling asynchronous trade execution and notifications, we’ll also explore how Stimulus controllers enhanced interactivity, Symfony Panther simplified end-to-end testing, and Zenstruck/Browser streamlined browser-based testing workflows. Through real-world examples and lessons learned, this session will showcase how these Symfony tools combined to create a robust, responsive, and thoroughly tested application. Whether you’re building an automated trading platform or tackling a similarly complex project, you’ll leave with practical insights and strategies to elevate your Symfony development skills.

Unleash the Power of Symfony Messenger (Kris Wallsmith)

This talk will go into detail about how Vacatia leverages the Symfony Messenger component to power our tech stack's critical integration layer. We will look at how and why we use multiple message buses, tracing across multiple messages, chaining interdependent messages together, and more. If you want to take your understanding of the messenger component to the next level, this talk is for you!

The Symfony Console gets a facelift! (Robin Chalas)

Console is one of the most widely used Symfony components and is the 5 top most downloaded PHP package overall. From mission-critical tools like Composer to other popular PHP frameworks and final applications, it's ubiquitous. The impact of this is that changing something into the component is hard - even the smallest bug fix is likely to break thousands of uses. Nevertheless, the component is constantly improving thanks to countless contributions it receives since it's been introduced in 2010, while taking care of preserving backward compatibility. But we think it's time to revisit it, not least to open up the component to more possibilities and rid it of some design issues. That's why we, a few key contributors have been working intensively to revisit it. It's happening now! Hopefully it will be publicly available in Symfony 7.3. Let me show you all this, get ready to rediscover the Console!

Symfony UX is not about Front-End (Simon André)

**Front-end is not about user.** Front-end has turned into a chaotic world. Simple tools solving developer problems gradually evolve into complex products, focused on justifying their own existence. Locking everyone in rigid ecosystems, preventing the emergence of interoperable standards. This front-end now serves clients, not users. **Symfony UX is not about front-end.** It’s a collection of pragmatic solutions, crafted to hide complexity and bridge the gap between developers and user experiences. Driven by a belief: today’s technologies offer powerful opportunities, ready to be harnessed. It’s time to drastically simplify tools, make development easier, faster, and refocus on what truly matters. **This talk is not about Symfony UX.** It's a reflection on the cycles of technology and its evolution. A moment to step back, to think about where we are and where we might go. A celebration of the web, open source, and Symfony, of their strength over trends, over time. An homage to those who build today, inspire others, and shape a better tomorrow.