Symfony, a Lifelong Friend
By TRISOFT team
A framework is a collection of universal, reusable libraries that accomplish particular tasks to facilitate the development of software applications. Metaphorically, it is a skeleton, carcass or basement for a web application or website development. The same way as you buy an empty house and fill it with furniture, developers take a framework and fill it with modules of features.
Symfony is a PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP components. But beyond that, Symfony is a Philosophy, and a Community — all working together in harmony.
Published as a free software in October 2005, it is aimed at building robust applications and give developers full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. To match enterprise development guidelines, Symfony is bundled with additional tools to help developers test, debug and document projects.
In a nutshell, Symfony is pretty much everything one needs to create and maintain web applications and to replace repetitive coding tasks.
Why We Like Symfony
However, beyond the long list of advantage in using Symfony, we want to give you our inside, expert view on this great framework.
TRISOFT has been using Symfony for about 10 years now, since 2008, ever since Symfony1 and throughout all these years we found a trusted, loyal, adaptable friend in it.
Here are 7 reasons we absolutely adore our melodiously-named business companion — Symfony:
1. Reputation
Finding the perfect framework is like finding the perfect wife. It gives you comfort to know it has a well established reputation. Symfony is a very stable environment and also internationally recognized. It has sufficient references and they keep growing with every day.
Being an active community, it integrates developers, users and many other contributors who give their best to enrich this tool for the use of an entire group of professionals.
2. High flexibility
One of the most appreciated features in Symfony is the fact that it is one of the most feature-rich PHP frameworks. This means that it makes good use of two most outstanding technological benefits — Bundles and Components. How do they work?
Well, bundles on the one hand are decoupled — which means one can reconfigure and reuse them for many applications and this way reduce the overall development cost.
On the other hand, Symfony has 30 components facilitating the development process by reducing the routine tasks and allowing developers to focus on specific business features. Symfony components can be used as stand-alone in other frameworks or in plain PHP solutions.
With the help of these two technologies, we have a highly flexible application, with a lot of independence and little dependencies, thus diminishing the risk of messing up the whole architecture with one tiny change.
3. Easy testing
In order to ensure stable work of an application, each line of code needs testing. Symfony is one framework that has proven easy for the testing process, mainly due to the absence of strict dependencies and possibility to create design patterns.
This way, both unit and functional testing are easy and automated, to reduce additional work a developer has to engage into.
4. Innovation
So Symfony has speed, flexibility and the magic reusable components. But that is not all, we have discovered. The team and company behind Symfony, is the kind of enterprise always striving for excellence. This quality has been naturally transmitted to Symfony as well.
So it is that Symfony is always on the watch for improvement in areas like productivity, clarity and efficiency. Symfony is a live framework, restless in its way to genuine innovation.
5. Long-term support
With Symfony, you have security and stability. The framework is well-tested and benefits of regular updates.
Also, the most recent versions stay long-term supported and compatible with the newer releases: up to 3 years for some of the versions.
6. Large community
Being open-source, Symfony is based on an ever growing community, at the core of which there are the developers working for improvements. But aside from the devs, there are also PHP experts and enthusiasts from all over the world, who take part in making the code better for everybody.
Community matters and Symfony has over 2000 contributors, which is several times more than other PHP frameworks communities.
7. Solid documentation
You know how frustrating it is to have incomplete or outdated documentation on your hands when you want to work with a specific technology. And truth is many tools offer disappointing resources for their users.
Symfony however is considered one of the most solidly documented. It is clearly written, well-structured, supplied with eхamples, and updated from version to version. You can find an explanation of every component and the development process as a whole.
The framework, the goal, the team
The goal of using a framework is definitely to simplify and speed up the development process. In order to make it even more efficient, you need modular-based architecture, bundles, components, documentation and support. But above all, you need a professional team that will put all these features to good use.
At TRISOFT, we promote professionalism, efficiency and best practices. We chose Symfony more than ten years ago because it gives us those and much more, because it is a powerful, robust PHP framework and a trusted, longlife friend to us. And we are choosing great developers ever since, because most of the time success depends less on the instruments you choose to use and more on whether the work is in good hands or not.
Have more questions about how we work with Symfony? Write to us here, and we’ll be happy to help!
