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Symfony 2.0 is now available

113 points| j0k3r | 14 years ago |symfony.com | reply

72 comments

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[+] deweller|14 years ago|reply
I've looked through some source code in the Symfony 2 components. The code is well organized, commented, and most of all it is of high quality.

As far as I am concerned, Symfony 2 is the gold standard example for developing a PHP project of any kind.

[+] eLod|14 years ago|reply
i researched a few php frameworks (sy2, zend, cake, li3, kohana, etc.) a little while, and by far i'm most satisfied with lithium (li3, http://lithify.me/). depending on 5.3 seems to open up a wide range of possibilities and oftentimes i feel like 'this is the way to do it', whereas i felt like 'the framework is getting in my way' with sy2 for example.
[+] eurohacker|14 years ago|reply
what do you think about Yii framework which is also gaining popularity these days,
[+] neovive|14 years ago|reply
The project team did an amazing job with this release. I'm not a Symfony user myself, but their website is very professional and well organized and the documentation is excellent -- very thorough and updated for the new release.

Beyond methodology and community, one of the major decisions involved when selecting a framework is being confident that your codebase will be supported in the near future. The Symfony developers and community seem very committed to their framework. Great Job!

[+] websirnik|14 years ago|reply
I'm woking with Symfony 2 now for a half-year. And I can say that it is brilliant. Dependency Injection that they have implemented is a really nice feature. It is also great that it consists of de-coupled components. You can use any of the components including Dependency Injection in ur PHP projects.
[+] pcole|14 years ago|reply
Same here, I have been using it on a new project since November 2010 and it has been great, following the commits on Github and upgrading when necessary has been relatively easy. This project has really opened my eyes to the power that Git + Github (when used properly) can bring to open source software.

I would also like to add that Fabien Potencier has been amazing and is officially a coding Robot!

[+] celalo|14 years ago|reply
For those wants to know more about Symfony, I can assure you Symfony and Yii are at different leagues. Symfony is so much more featured than any PHP framework out there. Yml based settings and modeling plus the Admin Generator is one of a kind. I believe it is even better than Django and Rails, when it comes to flexibility and extensibility.
[+] narcissus|14 years ago|reply
Just curious about that first sentence there... are you saying that Symfony and Yii are both in the same league, different from everything else, or that Symfony is in a league different from the one that Yii is in?

I haven't looked at Symfony, but I was really impressed by the event driven nature of Yii, and I couldn't wipe the smile off my face when I started looking into the active page elements.

I think 2.0 is as good an excuse as any to check out Symfony though, so goodbye to the weekend :)

[+] eitland|14 years ago|reply
I also have some experience with symfony, at least 1.0. If you are one of those who thinks rails seems nice, but the job demands php/you prefer php, symfony is a good choice.

symfony was the project that made me realize that php doesn't need to be ugly.

[+] andypants|14 years ago|reply
How is 'yml based settings' one of a kind, or a deal-breaker when choosing frameworks?
[+] gary4gar|14 years ago|reply
Does Symfony had Lazy loading? which is the reason behind the performance of Yii.
[+] ericfrenkiel|14 years ago|reply
Congratulations to Fabien and the Sensio team! Fabien is an amazing evangelist for the framework, and I've had the good fortune to attend Fabien's talks on multiple occasions. I've used Symfony since 2007 and it's clear the framework has staying power and significant adoption with each new year. Congrats again!
[+] bergie|14 years ago|reply
I'm currently in process of building compatibility layers from our two old PHP frameworks (MidCOM and Midgard MVC) to Symfony, and have been very pleasantly surprised with both the code quality and the responsiveness of the community.

As part of this work I will also write new Symfony2 bundles for whatever functiolity our old frameworks had a SF2 misses. The first one is the ability to run Symfony2 apps under AppServer-in-PHP, a pure-PHP application/HTTP server. No Apache required! :-)

https://github.com/bergie/MidgardAppServerBundle

[+] ecaron|14 years ago|reply
I wish they would stop referring to their documentation as a "book." The keep calling the link to http://symfony.com/doc/current/book/index.html as their book, yet it offers no ebook manner of being accessed (my kingdom for a PDF.)

I can't help but wonder who this "book" is being marketed to because of this "you can only access the book while you're fully online" limitation.

[+] corry|14 years ago|reply
Can someone comment on Symfony vs. CodeIgniter? I've done a few projects in CI - any big compelling reason to switch to Symfony for the next one?
[+] eropple|14 years ago|reply
CodeIgniter is a fundamentally PHP4 system that is, today, wedged into more modern PHP5.3 programming practices. Personally, I can't see a good reason to use CI today (and I say that as someone who has used it extensively in the past--my capstone project at school was based on it!). If you want something CI-esque, you're better off looking at Kohana...but Kohana seems to give short shrift to certain important aspects, e.g. security is something of an afterthought.

Symfony2, on the other hand, can be pretty safely termed a modern system: it's almost completely modular (and not in the "override some files, it's like magic!" method of Kohana or CI), expects modern programming practices (it doesn't treat you like an idiot; you can use PHP 5.3 stuff like anonymous functions and it's cool with it), and is blazingly, blazingly fast when configured properly.

[+] celalo|14 years ago|reply
There is also sfGuardPlugin, a great plugin for user management. It has everything about user management, easily integrates with symfony. Saves you so much time.
[+] celalo|14 years ago|reply
Symfony has cool command line interface to set up projects, crud and all model classes etc. It also has backend admin genretor. There is no built in ajax and javascript function in codeigniter (But you can add it as plugin)
[+] skrebbel|14 years ago|reply
> Everything is a Bundle in Symfony2: A bundle is a directory containing a set of files (PHP files, stylesheets, JavaScripts, images, ...) that implement a single feature (a blog, a forum, etc). That changes everything. Share your bundles between your projects or publish them in the wild.

I have no idea whether this is novel, but it is to me, and I really like it.

[+] wulczer|14 years ago|reply
Sounds a little like apps in Djangoland. Maybe someone who knows both frameworks could confirm.
[+] te_chris|14 years ago|reply
SilverStripe's Sapphire framework has had this for quite a while, if you wanted to use it, with their modules. If you're in the mood for being that organised it can be really helpful.
[+] ZoFreX|14 years ago|reply
Very, very excited about this and have been for some time, congratulations to the team on the release! For those that don't know it, Symfony is a very impressive framework that puts a lot more into "Doing Things Right" than most other PHP frameworks, and some of their components (such as Assetic) are amazing contributions to the PHP ecosystem in their own right.
[+] gary4gar|14 years ago|reply
Congrats to Symfony2 Team!

FYI, Symfony2 requires minimum PHP version 5.3.2

PHP 5.3 which is not something every shared hosting provider will support, most are still on 5.2.series. so everyone should keep that in mind while writing PHP app with Symfony2

[+] abredow|14 years ago|reply
I hear these sorts of things regarding hosting all of the time. However, in my experience, if you are working on an app that is large enough to warrant using a framework like Symfony or Zend Framework, you are probably going to also be using your own server. People don't build large expensive applications and then deploy to GoDaddy or something :)
[+] j_col|14 years ago|reply
Well done to everyone involved, looking forward to checking out all of the new features.
[+] mrspeaker|14 years ago|reply
I'd never heard of Symfony before. Can someone point to some tech details about the framework? The site does a lot of explaining what a framework is, and some general philosophies - but not what this particular framework is.
[+] skrebbel|14 years ago|reply
Symfony is a rather popular PHP framework; it is commonly regarded in the PHP community as one of the higher-quality frameworks (amidst many half-baked frameworks that cause serious problems once your use case moves past the blog tutorial).

In terms of functionality, it's basically for PHP what Rails is for Ruby, but unlike many other PHP frameworks, it's been designed with the platform in mind rather than trying to force Rails' concepts into PHP, as a result if which it feels "just better". This has given it an edge over competitors, which is why Symfony is remarkably popular among the more professional PHP businesses.

I think it's basically the only mature and popular surviving framework that dates from the blast of PHP frameworks that came to be when Rails got popular and PHP coders wanted that too.

[+] siphr|14 years ago|reply
Same here. No Idea where this came from. To be honest the effort put into this could've just contributed to an existing open source framework for improvement.
[+] kayoone|14 years ago|reply
have been using Symfony since 2007. Today it powers the backend and website of my gaming startup and we still love it very much. Project is still SF 1.4 though, would love to upgrade to 2.0 but that would be too much work right now as 2.0 changes alot of basic principles.
[+] thesorrow|14 years ago|reply
In the meantime Zend Framework folks are designing Zend Framework 2.0 for PHP 5.4. U mad symfony ? :)
[+] AlexMuir|14 years ago|reply
I highly recommend Yii ( http://www.yiiframework.com/ ) for people looking for a PHP framework. I've never used Symfony so can't compare the two, but Yii has done everything I've asked of it.
[+] andypants|14 years ago|reply
I highly recommend Python for people looking into web development. I've never used PHP so can't compare the two, but Python has done everything I've asked of it.

(end joke)

[+] eurohacker|14 years ago|reply
someone should do a comparison between Symphony and Yii , what type of web applications is each of them more suitable ( plugins etc. considered )