Highlights on Symfony 5: Why migrate?

“Interview with Nicolas Grekas” (2/2). Symfony 5, the latest major version of Symfony has been released at the 2019 SymfonyCon in Amsterdam. What are the highlights on Symfony 5? In this second part, Nicolas Grekas from the Symfony core team, explains the reasons for migrating to Symfony 5.

JD: Symfony is specifically designed to help migrations. What are your best practices for a successful migration to Symfony 5? 

NG: It’s crucial to understand that migrating from Symfony 4 to Symfony 5 does not mean you need to rewrite the whole project. Code that no longer works with Symfony 5 gets labeled as such, and is deprecated. All you have to do is it to replace it with a documented alternative to switch smoothly to Symfony 5. 

Everything is set to migrate to Symfony 5 in a seamless way. It is the promise of continuous migration, which is one of the cornerstones of Symfony’s development. For each project, migrating from Symfony 4 to Symfony 5 follows a path that has been flagged both in the code itself and in the documentation. 

JD: Speaking of migration, we are hearing about backward compatibility. How does it help with migration? 

NG: Backward compatibility enables cheaper and simpler migration between minor versions of Symfony.

That is quite important, because many people still think that you should wait for the release of the long-term support version (LTS) before migrating. This is an outdated vision: if you migrate to Symfony 5.0 or 5.1 now, moving to the next minor versions will be very simple. This way, you can benefit from the latest features, while making sure to stick to a maintained version for about five years. 

JD: In a few words, what are the benefits for businesses to migrate to Symfony 5? 

NG: First of all, and this is already enough for me, Symfony 5 is now the best maintained version of Symfony. You should also consider that migrating to Symfony 5 allows you to benefit from unprecedented performance improvements. These improvements are no longer available in previous versions, including the Symfony 4.4 LTS version. 

And finally, when moving to Symfony 5, you have access to the latest features, but also to the latest simplifications identified in the community. For example, Symfony 5.1 introduces a new way to manage access control, which is more flexible and simpler, thus less risky and less costly to maintain. 

To learn more and keep up to date with Symfony evolutions, I strongly encourage companies to send their developer teams to Symfony conferences. The next one, SymfonyWorld 2020, will take place online in early December. 

Do you have a project to migrate to Symfony 5? SensioLabs, the creator of Symfony, helps you smoothly migrate your application.