Comments on: The Best PHP Framework: Is Symfony Really It?

By: Greg Metsker

Greg Metsker — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 19:35:50 +0000

Thanks for the article. I am new at python and this was a big help.

By: Cake 1.2 slowly to Symfony

Cake 1.2 slowly to Symfony — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:36:21 +0000

I work for a large advertising agency, before I started we only did MS .NET (C#) with the forms approach, we have since implemented Cake on many of our web builds however I have been looking to branch out into other MVC frameworks.

Long story short I looked into Symfony and found it to be what I was looking for. I esp. like the different “Environments” and being able to do a deploy right from the cmd line.

The Doctrine ORM just makes sence to me, and while I liked Cake alot I never like the whole dynamic ORM that it does. Doctrine on the other hand reminds me alot of Hibernate that I have used before in my J2EE development.

As far as the comment about not using frameworks goes, speed, consistency, re usability, portability(as in moved from one server to another) and flexibility are clearly not an issue for you or your poor clients then.

By: web development company

web development company — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:10:59 +0000

. . now the boosting your web development skills on Symfony or ROR is very invaluable to accomplish many web projects & helping to develop new trends website over . .

By: Tyler Havener

Tyler Havener — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:35:54 +0000

Um… Hello??? Codeigniter. Period. Done. Next Song. NEXT. SONG.

By: Shamun

Shamun — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 21:42:21 +0000

To be true all those frameworks are some individuals like you and us creators, they for them self to sit in business make a frameworks, all of us and you, just got cheated by them.

1. If you are doing a ajax and ajax, dealing with GET/POST, where the performance carry? Browser or in Framework? you cant prove me how the cake/symfony can make more performance on top of that? Because he is using himself the core of it, where we can make more better by pure hand muscles coder, like a guy wrote. You know what with respect f..k u too.

2. i use extJS, jQuery, and java for voip in local intranet solutions, the hell i ask to those frameworks designers, and the users, they does nothing, doing some packets switching for GET/POST. The rest thanks goes to PHP itself who is talking with shell.
a. the rest shit happens, between browsers rendering process and parsing the contents to the viewer, who made a click.
a.1: well if you are a company and you can do this your own and u need a framework, (millions of frameworks), you and all of us we are following should be renamed to IDIOTS.

b. making those frameworks more and more popular really a business in reallity
c. some idiots sitting in banks/high job fields make those frameworks more popular for a shit
d. when we are talking about performence we go to cgi or bash shell, search those frameworks

Those job fields and those job providers are some kind of hipnotised on those names, nothing else..

There are many ppls who not beliveing on those frameworks (after the popularity in the market a ASS is also renamed as DIAMOND).

Thanks

By: helloworlder

helloworlder — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 08:31:42 +0000

RAD frameworks like CakePHP and RoR can be good if you’re an expert in MVC, but not for beginners. It hides too much detail from you – it’s like trying to use Dreamweaver and not knowing HTML. Yes the analogy can only go so far but I think it’s a good one. RAD frameworks advertise that they handle all the boring, common stuff that is in every web app. But the problem is it’s the non-typical stuff you need to do that takes up the majority of your time (except for trivial applications). When it comes to doing the non-typical stuff in a RAD framework often you find yourself frustrated and going onto IRC to ask how to do the most trivial thing, because you don’t understand how the framework *really* works, therefore you can’t control it.

For people who are somewhat familiar with OOP but not experts in MVC, they should invest time in learning a framework such as the Zend Framework before moving onto RAD frameworks, otherwise I think you’re hurting yourself in the long run

That’s my experience and opinion anyway.

By: Rolf Ernst

Rolf Ernst — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 04:28:41 +0000

Just wrote a piece on my site about Symfony, RoR, Grails and CodeIgniter.. After having looked into these things in quite some detail (plus glanced at Zend) I really have to sum it up as go with what works for you. All these things do the same basic functions in different ways. Only symFony has an admin generator that is really flexible. RoR has some addons for that but people gave me caveats on those. RoR and Groovy likely perform a bit better but really, in the end, they all do what you want. All of them have a lot steeper learning curve than they let on (yes, you can crank out a Hello World by creating project with tons of files automatically, creating a domain class, some sort of template and view and finally whatever you call an action (different system use slightly different terminology). Of course, when you read something like this it sounds like the last thing in the world would be to use a framework but the fact of the matter is that you also won’t have to write much more to track inventory or sales than for Hello World.

Anyhow, use whatever you like. I find it silly to argue over minor differences. If you only do shared hosting I some serious questions as to the professionalism of your business. I rent a VPS for $25 from Echo Servers and it gives me root access (Actually, I rebuilt the box via ssh from scratch). You won’t get Ruby from every hoster, you certainly have to look for Tomcat for Groovy (or Jetty) so bottom line is that you really want to control your environment anyhow.

I find that these things pay off very quickly once you get the hang of it. Initially they are a nightmare.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 18:54:41 +0000

This is a really useful article however I wonder what your opinion is now in Late 2009?

I have heard from others (today) that Symphony is far better (eg more mature) than Zend Framework – which is great as I have been playing around with Cake PHP 1.2 all weekend.

Wus – yeah! anyone who doesnt code in machine code or assembler, in notepad, is a wus! Oh well, i guess someone had to get the small brain..

By: joy

joy — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 20:59:06 +0000

Hi You can use Cakephp with zend framework.
Please go to http://www.docterweb.info/2009/11/cakephp-zend-framework-fusion.html to make it working

By: James

James — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:37:43 +0000

I just wanted to post and say thanks for the articles, and for shutting the anonymous know-it-all down with this line:

“Well, to be honest, I was just using ’slang’ and shortening MVC framework to just MVC. I guess that threw you off, so I fixed it.
I agree DP is a good read.”

That made my day.

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 12:01:06 +0000

Fabien Potencier is the author of much of the Symphony framework. His PHP is a shining example of how to code PHP. Now take a look at the mishmashes of hacked together code of some other frameworks.

#Remember, if we hadn’t have kept reinventing the wheel, we would still be rolling stones around on logs.

By: JT

JT — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 04:53:43 +0000

I may a bit late on a comment here, but the “Only wusses need a framework Seriously” guy is obviously some high school kid whom has never developed a real application. Using an MVC framework is a lot more difficult a task then writing a bundle of procedural spaghetti. I feel sorry for future developers that have to come in and debug your non-standardized code. On another note, yes, Symfony is in my opinion the best PHP framework. It takes the best of Rails and makes for a clean development environment (one with documented standards, not solo God developer wuss like self observed methods that require reverse engineering it the near future after bugs have been discovered). All other mentioned frameworks (including Zend) are also solid. It really depends on the application being developed and developer to decide which is the best fit. Although I still feel Symfony is the best and getting better revision by revision.

By: jason

jason — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:44:35 +0000

Only wusses get in their cars and drive places. Real men put on their running shoes and run everywhere they go.

By: chracks

chracks — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:30:46 +0000

how about seagull? we’ve shifted from it to zend. my boss started doing a modification of zend and tried adding smarty as a templating engine. but the problem is it’s not anymore utilizing the view part of the framework. and i’m just having problem concerning ajax. i just have to modify the smarty template being used when an ajax request is being made. i don’t want to add some logic in every controller telling it to fetch the template in another directory (which is appropriate for ajax responses removing some unnecessary stuffs like the header and footer). so i requested if an overriding feature or something can be implemented. in response, he suggested the use of plugins which utilizes zend’s plugin architecture to enter some intervention in the dispatch process. but damn, the plugin won’t give me access to the controller.

anyway, i know i’m off tangent in the topic here. anyway, just told you the things happening in my days work.

By: hariharan

hariharan — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 16:32:48 +0000

I tried cakephp and it sucks in terms of developing web 2.0 applications especially when establishing through associations like Ruby on rails. Also the way it produces query pattern sucks like anything. Requesting your view of PHP on Trax. Is it alternative for RoR developers??? I will give a try symfony for your sake. But what about perfomance issues when compared with cake and CI?? is symfony benchmarks in terms of perfomance???