I’m in the process of choosing a new framework.
Has anyone used symfony? how do you like it?
I looked into it for a project. I decided against it, primarily because finding documentation on specific aspects on the site is a pain. (Go to the site and try to find the Controller or Model documentation!). They seem far more interested in selling books than providing easily accessible full documentation on the site.
Of course, that’s not to say it’s a bad framework but that’s a huge hurdle for me and one that really prevented me looking into it much further than that.
I would recommend it very highly indeed. There’s a wealth of information and documentation on the 1.x branch (including several books).
Version 2.0 is currently under development and is scheduled for release in a few months.
version 2.0 looks quite sexy, particularly if what they say about performance is true.
They have a nice tutorial project as well. It looks to be a standard MVC framework which emulates ruby on rails (seems to be the new trend these days)
I’ll look into it.
I too have looked into Symphony, many times in fact. I prefer a simple library which I can download immediately and begin using, something codeignitor does well. However CI breaks a lot of OO best practices, whereas Symphony is probably more akin to Zend in that regard.
They seem far more interested in selling books than providing easily accessible full documentation on the site.
They do now, wowza!!! That being said, they seem to offer PDF versions of all books for free download, so thats not bad. I couldn’t easily find API docs though, then again I gave up pretty easy.
Symphony is an joint effort. Twig the template engine was started by someone else and adopted by Symphony (Fabien?). He also seems to have adopted SwiftMailer as the primarily mailing engine. Both are excellent projects and I have used both many times, but when I use a framework, consistency is key and you don’t get that with Symphony, not as well as Zend.
The complexity of both those frameworks turn me, especially Zend and it’s routing.
I would prefer a barebones controller architecture-oriented framework and tweak it as I go. Of course the many supplementry libraries that come with Zend are really nice, many of which I use regularly.
Cheers,
Alex