One of the strengths of the symfony application framework are all the useful plugins you can get to extend it. I’ve used quite a few on the Art in Action project.
However, as I observe the symfony web site from day to day I notice an interesting phenomenon. Developers love creating plugins. Almost every day there are more plugins. Yet few of these plugins are very useful. Often times the same topic gets reimplemented over and over again. Furthermore, the developers have an early fit of enthusiasm and release quite a few versions, then one never hears from them again. What’s going on here is that people enjoy showing off their code by sharing it, but aren’t really interested in putting in the energy to make it truly general or supportable. Even more so, they aren’t interested in understanding other peoples’ code and figuring out how to generalize it. For example one of the more popular plugins is the very useful Lucene Plugin. In the source repository it already has a branch supporting solr. However, now someone just released a new plugin to do Solr. Why? Why not just fix the Lucene Plugin ? Of course, users aren’t fooled, and in fact what you see is that a few plugins are very popular, but over half the plugins have no more than 1 user, including the author themselves.
I’m very curious now that the Symfony 1.3 release date is set, and especially with the decision to make Doctrine the default ORM, how long it will take for the popular plugins (where we’ll define popular as having > 10 registered users on the website) to get updated. I strongly suspect I will wind up having to port a bunch of them myself. It’s this bit of forthcoming work that’s motivating my diatribe above. If folks wouldn’t do quite as much duplicative work, and focus a little more on building out what’s already released, it would benefit everyone. Of course, human nature gets in the way here. What I’m asking for is deeper thinking and extra work in the short term for a long term benefit, and as many folks are working on projects with very short term deadlines, that short term effort just isn’t practical.
In looking closely at the user group, I observe another sociological phenomenon at work. A lot of Symfony users are consultants who build a lot of sites for clients. As such, they are attracted to Symfony because it’s power allows them to complete their projects faster with much less effort. However, being consultants, they tend to finish one project and then move on to the next – I suspect many of them never maintain their projects much. The result of that is a focus on getting projects done quickly today, but little concern, about say, updating a project from one version of Symfony to the next. Instead, the developer will simply switch to a newer version upon starting some new project. That behavior also reduces the desire to contribute to real reuse. Of course, these same developers benefit greatly when there are truly reusable pieces out there.
All of this shows that the varied motivations of human beings greatly complicate technical decisions in ways not predictable from the technology alone.
