Categories
symfony

The first thoughts..

I’d like to start talking about the symfony framework with the question to you.
Do you really need it? I mean is there the strong reason why you decided to use Symfony? I spent quite long time looking for a good PHP framework. Of course I have a couple of
hand-written frameworks which I used for a long time and sometimes they saved my ass (I’m talking about the cases when I need a project today which had to be ready yesterday).

This is MVCMS – the oldest one framework which I’ve developed at the dark medieval times when PHP4 was just starting to become popular and noone knows about all those PHP5’s advantages:

http://www.narkozateam.com/mvcms/mvcms.html

I was young and full of willing to implement MVC paradign anyhow just to make sure it
works (and just as a side comment – finally, I turned out that MVCMS is not MVC in fact).

After that there were a couple of efforts to build valueable frameworks which would save project development time up to zero days. Of course I built up good and they helped me but I always felt that if I could get support of php developers community – framework will be much better.

Yeah, there were always existed PEAR and frameworks like that.. But that was more like set of ready solutions and not monolite framework.

I think “x” time happened when PHP5 has appeared. After that number of frameworks
have been starting to grow and right now:

http://www.coldscripts.com/PHP/Scripts/Development/Frameworks

I would like to underline 2 of those frameworks – CakePHP and Symfony.

Symfony provides a lot of features seamlessly integrated together, such as:

  • simple templating and helpers
  • cache management
  • smart URLs
  • scaffolding
  • multilingualism and I18N support
  • object model and MVC separation
  • Ajax support
  • enterprise ready

And in fact, that is not the full list. It’s quickly developing and there is really big interesting from community side, so you can find a lot of usefull comments and advices on symfony forum.