The site aims to bring about a much greater degree of communication between professionals working in similar areas, but perhaps separated by different institutions or geography (for example those working in medical education, front-line medics or managers who oversee the sector as a whole).

About Synapse

Synapse is an interactive website supporting postgraduate medical training in London. The site works by bringing members of the London medical training in contact with each other and allows anyone involved in their training to send messages to them and also provides information on their specialty schools, foundation schools, policies and training in general.

With Synapse, users can:

• Send messages to fellow trainees, trainers and admin staff involved with their training
• Allow them find key people in their school, training programme, trust, college, hospital
• Allows them to learn about news, training days and events - find policies, forms, procedures and useful documents
• Create web pages for their school, trust and training programme
• Create groups for training-related topics
• Carry out surveys
• Create forums for professional discussion
• Provide the community with an organised, friendly and easy-to-use way to share their knowledge and resources with each other
• Help everyone to know at any point in time:
  • Who is around them
  • What resources are available to help them
  • What is happening that is relevant to them
  • Provide space for groups of trainees and trainers to collaborate with their colleagues
  • Create a single, reliable pathway to contact each person etc.

Synapse is built on symfony open source php framework.

London Deanery has selected Eton Digital as a long term partner to re-launch Synapse, execute an ambitious development plan and provide Synapse with its ongoing Web based technology needs.

It seems Francois' frustrations with the closed nature of Symfony development (he says 95% of decisions are made by one man - creator Fabien Potencier) finally outweighed his enjoyment of working on the project, prompting him to leave (more details can be found at Redo The Web, Francois' blog).

Despite boasting some pretty high profile users (Yahoo Bookmarks and Askeet to name a couple) and thousands of smaller ones (see this Symfony list of some of the key sites built on the framework), the initiative is seeing a slight increase in criticism, namely from some web 2.0 developer's blogs.

It seems they too are also growing concerned that the majority of Symfony work is done mainly by Potencier, although the software is opensource and boasts a fairly decent development community. Kwiqq.com, a social website builder, has recently announced their decision to move away from Symfony to Zend, highlighting the slight but nonetheless noticeable drop in SF usage levels around the time of Francois' departure (see their blog for more info).

Despite still having a slightly higher usage level overall (than Zend) it seems SF's numbers are currently heading in the wrong direction (though it is unlikely to be more than a brief downturn).

However the key point is that SF offers users much that its alternatives cannot - the very reason it is still so popular despite these (exaggerated) doubts over its future. Creating large-scale projects quickly is always easier with SF and the learning curve, especially in relation to PHP requirements, is far more forgiving; Zend for example requires some pretty advanced PHP skills in order to use effectively.

Symfony's low performance overheads, plus its minimal pre-requisites (Unix, Mac OS, or Windows with a web server and PHP 5) make it accessible and quick to get running. Yes its true the community is not as broad as with certain other open source initiatives (let's not forget its still pretty useful - check it out here), but the fact remains that Symfony still does what it has always done, with or without Francois; it allows you to build ambitious large scale web apps quickly and effectively (especially social networks), and it is free.

The question really should not be about choosing which is better of Zend or Symfony or any other for that matter, but rather in understanding the strengths of what is out there and when to use which option. Ultimately all of this software is free so to criticise it in any way other than with constructive feedback is to totally miss the point of the whole concept.

As for us here at EtonDigital, we intend to continue using SF just as we have always done in the past (see our 'featured work' section for a full list of our recent projects, including the professional social network Skipso) and being grateful for its services. Its main creator Fabien Potencier is firmly committed to the project, as is his six-strong dedicated development team and its sponsor Sensio Labs. Francois' departure will be felt in that a talented and creative member of the team has left - but as his blog post title ('no-one is irreplaceable') makes clear, this is not some crisis of staffing and organisation at SF but merely the natural merry-go-round of human resources...

Dejan Levi

Skipso allows all users to create a free individual profile from which to manage all Skipso activity. From here you can participate at a community level in activities such as joining thinktanks, rating other content or asking and answering questions. You can publish your own blogs and presentations to selected users or the network as a whole, create or join events, and even win awards for solving challenges posted by others.

Skipso's marketplace feature enables you to also create a profile for your organisation or company and manage relevant activities such as staff recruitment and inter-company networking, as well as locating funding and investors for various projects.

The beauty of Skipso is that it brings together an often fragmented sector and places everyone from environmental campaigners and scientific experts to business investors and top executives in the same 'room'. By creating a united space for such activities to spring from we have a much better chance of achieving the goals of clean, sustainable technological and business development for the future.

No longer will scientific expertise be locked away in university libraries, or those wishing to invest in sustainable developments have to scour far and wide for available opportunities - Skipso is here, recognising the business, environmental and logistical challenges faced in the 21st century, and offering a unique and effective solution.

Take a guided tour or sign up for the Beta version today on www.skipso.com

Platform: symfony

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