6 ms·

Symfony 2.0 is now available

113 points by j0k3r 15y ago

j_col 15y ago
Well done to everyone involved, looking forward to checking out all of the new features.
bergie 15y ago
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 https://github.com/bergie/MidgardAppServerBundle
- mweibel 15y ago
  Since PHP 5.4 there's a web server built-in: http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php Maybe you could rely on that, instead of aip :)
  - bergie 15y ago
    Maybe, though AiP gives us nice control of the process. And it also supports other modes than HTTP, like Mongrel2 and SCGI: https://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php/tree/master/AiP/Protocol https://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php/tree/master/AiP... Anyway, based on your suggestion I posted a quick ticket about adding support for the built-in PHP webserver: https://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php/issues/17 https://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php/issues/17
  - Mandar 15y ago
    From your very link: "This web server is designed for developmental purposes only, and should not be used in production."
mrspeaker 15y ago
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.
- siphr 15y ago
  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.
  - bergie 15y ago
    The blog post gives some background. Popularity: Another way to understand the level of the community commitment is to compare it with other projects. Symfony2 is currently the most popular PHP project on Github (most forked and most watched overall) and the 12th most forked project for the whole Github platform. That's just astonishing! Standards compliance: Symfony2 embraces standards: First, Symfony2 is willingly centered around the HTTP specification (just have a look at the built-in HTTP reverse proxy). Then, we are embracing the PHP standards: PHPUnit, namespaces, PSR-0 autoloader, ... That makes Symfony2 easily interoperable with many other great PHP libraries. Caching: By embracing the HTTP standard, and thanks to the ESI standard, you can make your application fly very easily. Make your application as dynamic as you need it to be, and still benefit from HTTP caching. And if you can afford the installation of a reverse proxy like Varnish, the performance of your application will just be incredible.
    - ZoFreX 15y ago
      Bear in mind that ESI with Varnish is a tricky one! But it is very, very exciting to see a framework embracing it nonetheless.
  - eitland 15y ago
    Careful; symfony has been around for a few years already. Saying the effort should be put into some other framework is effectively turning the case upside down.
AlexMuir 15y ago
I highly recommend Yii ( http://www.yiiframework.com/ 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 15y ago
  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 15y ago
  someone should do a comparison between Symphony and Yii , what type of web applications is each of them more suitable ( plugins etc. considered )
celalo 15y ago
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.
- eitland 15y ago
  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 15y ago
  How is 'yml based settings' one of a kind, or a deal-breaker when choosing frameworks?
  - celalo 15y ago
    I should not say 'yml based settings' is a deal-breaker but it sure is a very good way of configuring the project. I personally take advantage of this convenience quite often. You can easily update your schema through yaml files and you can build&generate your whole model including auto-generated forms & filters for CRUD in a glimpse. I believe this is very friendly with agile principles.
    - andypants 15y ago
      But you can just as easily update settings stored in other formats.
      - celalo 15y ago
        Yes you are right. But It does not have to be all about yaml format itself. Instead, Symfony utilizes this format to get things done in a fast and neat way, in comparison to others.
skrebbel 15y ago
> 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 15y ago
  Sounds a little like apps in Djangoland. Maybe someone who knows both frameworks could confirm.
  - bergie 15y ago
    This has been a core idea in both Midgard MVC and MidCOM PHP frameworks, though we called them components. http://wiki.openpsa2.org/index.php/MidCOM_Components http://wiki.openpsa2.org/index.php/MidCOM_Components https://github.com/midgardproject/midgardmvc_core/blob/master/documentation/index.markdown https://github.com/midgardproject/midgardmvc_core/blob/maste...
    - john2x 15y ago
      I really hate why Django calls them 'apps'. Kinda difficult to distinguish between a working application or a Django 'app'.
      - code_duck 15y ago
        I agree, I might have one 'app' that is what I consider my actual application, but then alongside it at the same level, something like Django OAuth. It would be a stretch to call django-registration or OAuth an 'app', since they can't do anything alone.
- te_chris 15y ago
  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.
thesorrow 15y ago
In the meantime Zend Framework folks are designing Zend Framework 2.0 for PHP 5.4. U mad symfony ? :)
retro212 15y ago
If you need a lightweight - Sinatra like framework check http://silex-project.org/ http://silex-project.org/ it is built from Symfony components and works like a charm
- bergie 15y ago
  Silex is cool. I did a quick-and-dirty benchmark with it and AiP a while back, and performance was comparable to Node.js and Express: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/php_can_perform_better_than_node-js/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/php_can_perform_better_than_node-j...
ZoFreX 15y ago
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 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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 :)
  - te_chris 15y ago
    Agree completely. CodeIgniter used to use this as an argument for supporting PHP4 (!!?!?!?), but it seems so bankrupt. I (anecdotal, I know) don't know a single person writing an application (what these frameworks are designed for) who would deploy to a classic shared hosting environment over a VPS or app cloud service.
websirnik 15y ago
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 15y ago
  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!
corry 15y ago
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?
- celalo 15y ago
  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)
- celalo 15y ago
  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.
  - Mandar 15y ago
    This is a symfony 1.4 plugin. A nice Symfony2 equivalent is FOSUserBundle (https://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSUserBundle https://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSUserBundle).
- eropple 15y ago
  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.
  - 15y ago
deweller 15y ago
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.
- eurohacker 15y ago
  what do you think about Yii framework which is also gaining popularity these days,
  - ryeguy 15y ago
    I think it's disgusting. It tries to use the component model, similar to ASP.NET. Even Microsoft realized what a disaster it was, and the community moving to ASP.NET MVC, which is similar to traditional frameworks.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
  - timewasted 15y ago
    I used Yii for a little bit while trying to decide if I wanted to use it or Symfony 2, and I just didn't like it. The page caching felt horribly clunky to me, and there was no built-in way to manage HTTP headers. Ultimately though, I didn't decide against Yii because of what it couldn't do, but decided on Symfony 2 because of what it did do. It was just a more pleasant experience, and I never felt like I had to fight the framework to do what I wanted to do. Sure, it had a steeper learning curve than Yii (I started using it in the preview release stage, when documentation was in flux), but I feel that it made me write better code.
- eLod 15y ago
  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/ 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.
neovive 15y ago
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!
kayoone 15y ago
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.
ericfrenkiel 15y ago
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!
ecaron 15y ago
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 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.

113 points by j0k3r 15y ago

j_col 15y ago

Well done to everyone involved, looking forward to checking out all of the new features.

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 https://github.com/bergie/MidgardAppServerBundle

mweibel 15y ago
Since PHP 5.4 there's a web server built-in: http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php http://php.net/manual/en/features.commandline.webserver.php Maybe you could rely on that, instead of aip :)
- bergie 15y ago
  Maybe, though AiP gives us nice control of the process. And it also supports other modes than HTTP, like Mongrel2 and SCGI: https://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php/tree/master/AiP/Protocol https://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php/tree/master/AiP... Anyway, based on your suggestion I posted a quick ticket about adding support for the built-in PHP webserver: https://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php/issues/17 https://github.com/indeyets/appserver-in-php/issues/17
- Mandar 15y ago
  From your very link: "This web server is designed for developmental purposes only, and should not be used in production."

mrspeaker 15y ago

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.

siphr 15y ago
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.
- bergie 15y ago
  The blog post gives some background. Popularity: Another way to understand the level of the community commitment is to compare it with other projects. Symfony2 is currently the most popular PHP project on Github (most forked and most watched overall) and the 12th most forked project for the whole Github platform. That's just astonishing! Standards compliance: Symfony2 embraces standards: First, Symfony2 is willingly centered around the HTTP specification (just have a look at the built-in HTTP reverse proxy). Then, we are embracing the PHP standards: PHPUnit, namespaces, PSR-0 autoloader, ... That makes Symfony2 easily interoperable with many other great PHP libraries. Caching: By embracing the HTTP standard, and thanks to the ESI standard, you can make your application fly very easily. Make your application as dynamic as you need it to be, and still benefit from HTTP caching. And if you can afford the installation of a reverse proxy like Varnish, the performance of your application will just be incredible.
  - ZoFreX 15y ago
    Bear in mind that ESI with Varnish is a tricky one! But it is very, very exciting to see a framework embracing it nonetheless.
- eitland 15y ago
  Careful; symfony has been around for a few years already. Saying the effort should be put into some other framework is effectively turning the case upside down.

AlexMuir 15y ago

I highly recommend Yii ( http://www.yiiframework.com/ 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 15y ago
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 15y ago
someone should do a comparison between Symphony and Yii , what type of web applications is each of them more suitable ( plugins etc. considered )

celalo 15y ago

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.

eitland 15y ago
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 15y ago
How is 'yml based settings' one of a kind, or a deal-breaker when choosing frameworks?
- celalo 15y ago
  I should not say 'yml based settings' is a deal-breaker but it sure is a very good way of configuring the project. I personally take advantage of this convenience quite often. You can easily update your schema through yaml files and you can build&generate your whole model including auto-generated forms & filters for CRUD in a glimpse. I believe this is very friendly with agile principles.
  - andypants 15y ago
    But you can just as easily update settings stored in other formats.
    - celalo 15y ago
      Yes you are right. But It does not have to be all about yaml format itself. Instead, Symfony utilizes this format to get things done in a fast and neat way, in comparison to others.

skrebbel 15y ago

> 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 15y ago
Sounds a little like apps in Djangoland. Maybe someone who knows both frameworks could confirm.
- bergie 15y ago
  This has been a core idea in both Midgard MVC and MidCOM PHP frameworks, though we called them components. http://wiki.openpsa2.org/index.php/MidCOM_Components http://wiki.openpsa2.org/index.php/MidCOM_Components https://github.com/midgardproject/midgardmvc_core/blob/master/documentation/index.markdown https://github.com/midgardproject/midgardmvc_core/blob/maste...
  - john2x 15y ago
    I really hate why Django calls them 'apps'. Kinda difficult to distinguish between a working application or a Django 'app'.
    - code_duck 15y ago
      I agree, I might have one 'app' that is what I consider my actual application, but then alongside it at the same level, something like Django OAuth. It would be a stretch to call django-registration or OAuth an 'app', since they can't do anything alone.
te_chris 15y ago
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.

thesorrow 15y ago

In the meantime Zend Framework folks are designing Zend Framework 2.0 for PHP 5.4. U mad symfony ? :)

retro212 15y ago

If you need a lightweight - Sinatra like framework check http://silex-project.org/ http://silex-project.org/ it is built from Symfony components and works like a charm

bergie 15y ago
Silex is cool. I did a quick-and-dirty benchmark with it and AiP a while back, and performance was comparable to Node.js and Express: http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/php_can_perform_better_than_node-js/ http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/php_can_perform_better_than_node-j...

ZoFreX 15y ago

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 15y ago

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 15y ago
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 :)
- te_chris 15y ago
  Agree completely. CodeIgniter used to use this as an argument for supporting PHP4 (!!?!?!?), but it seems so bankrupt. I (anecdotal, I know) don't know a single person writing an application (what these frameworks are designed for) who would deploy to a classic shared hosting environment over a VPS or app cloud service.

websirnik 15y ago

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 15y ago
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!

corry 15y ago

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?

celalo 15y ago
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)
celalo 15y ago
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.
- Mandar 15y ago
  This is a symfony 1.4 plugin. A nice Symfony2 equivalent is FOSUserBundle (https://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSUserBundle https://github.com/FriendsOfSymfony/FOSUserBundle).
eropple 15y ago
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.
- 15y ago

deweller 15y ago

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.

eurohacker 15y ago
what do you think about Yii framework which is also gaining popularity these days,
- ryeguy 15y ago
  I think it's disgusting. It tries to use the component model, similar to ASP.NET. Even Microsoft realized what a disaster it was, and the community moving to ASP.NET MVC, which is similar to traditional frameworks.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
- timewasted 15y ago
  I used Yii for a little bit while trying to decide if I wanted to use it or Symfony 2, and I just didn't like it. The page caching felt horribly clunky to me, and there was no built-in way to manage HTTP headers. Ultimately though, I didn't decide against Yii because of what it couldn't do, but decided on Symfony 2 because of what it did do. It was just a more pleasant experience, and I never felt like I had to fight the framework to do what I wanted to do. Sure, it had a steeper learning curve than Yii (I started using it in the preview release stage, when documentation was in flux), but I feel that it made me write better code.
eLod 15y ago
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/ 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.

neovive 15y ago

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!

kayoone 15y ago

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.

ericfrenkiel 15y ago

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!

ecaron 15y ago

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 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.