With Symfony2’s scheduled release for late 2010, developers are already getting excited about the wealth of new features, compatibility, and simplicity of Symfony2. This article showcases five great reasons to explore and try out Symfony2. –by Ryan Weaver and James Charlesworth

The web development world is currently going through all sorts of mayhem. Do you develop for the web or for a mobile device? Do you use a framework or a language that you know? Are you working on the server or on the client? Is the server even necessary anymore or should you just create a fat-client that talks to the server? While there is no shortage of advice on any of these fronts, NOLOH continues with its vision of an ideal, lightweight and on-demand unified server-side development platform for all your development needs, whether it’s for a website, web application, or mobile application. –by Asher Snyder and Philip Ross

You want to write a secure, scalable, cloud-like application, where you can store data only limited by the amount of disk space that you can throw at it. You’ve looked at a variety of services that are available today, including Amazon S3, DropBox, UbuntuOne, Google Docs, . You feel that cloud computing is either the way of the future or you’re open to it being one of the key technologies with which to be involved, but like most open-source enthusiasts, you want to experiment with making one for yourself. Well, let’s look at how you can. –by Matthew Setter

Benchmarks are a good idea for building scalable applications, but they can be enhanced when paired with data from similar software. This article looks at a set of benchmarks taken against various bulletin board software solutions. –by Josh Woody

Deployment is one of those areas where Drupal has typically had issues, and there have been quite a few alternative remedies proposed for this situation. Knowing how to migrate changes to a production environment can help you avoid many common time-consuming pitfalls when pursuing your own Drupal development efforts. In this column, I would like to discuss some of the issues we face and the possible solutions when deploying Drupal from development to production.
–by Adrian Webb

Firesheep has caused an uproar, but what can we actually do about it? –by Arne Blankerts

An application that ignores failure is bound to…well…fail. –by Marco Tabini

Plan for it from the start! –by Elizabeth Tucker Long

Check out the latest reader-submitted ElePHPant sighting!