Table of contents

• What is a software framework?
• What is Symfony?
• Who created Symfony
• Projects using Symfony
• Reasons to use Symfony framework
• To wrap up

Development and music have a lot in common.

You know a good song when you hear one. It has great chords, melodies, and lyrics.

Similarly, killer software requires code that is readable, robust, and performant. It’s important to address these requirements from the beginning when its architecture is being mapped out.

When it comes to PHP frameworks, Symfony is one of the most popular frameworks available. Developers love Symfony because it simplifies the coding process and gives enormous freedom in building applications. And businesses opt for this framework because of its stability, flexibility, and efficiency.

Symfony has powerful functionality and well-thought-out architecture. It allows developers to fully control the customization of applications.

Before we jump into the discussion of the benefits Symfony can provide to your business, let’s clarify what a framework is.

What is a software framework?

A framework is a collection of ready-made parts of the program that could be reused. Metaphorically, it’s a carcass of a web application.

The goal of the framework is to simplify the solution of often-repeated tasks and speed up the development of the software.

What is Symfony?

• Creator: Fabien Potencier
• Initial release: 22 October 2005
• Written in: PHP
• Operating system: Cross-platform
• Type: Web application framework
• License: MIT license
• Repository: Symfony Repository
• Website: symfony.com
• Facebook: facebook.com/SensioLabs
• Twitter: twitter.com/sensiolabs
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/sensiolabs

Symfony is a model-view-controller framework written in PHP. Its official website declares :

Symfony is a set of PHP Components, a Web Application framework, a Philosophy, and a Community — all working together in harmony.

Symfony boasts :

• 3000+ contributors
• over 600,000 developers
• more than 200,000,000 monthly downloads

With Symfony, you can reduce production time and make it easier to add new functions. Hundreds of sites and applications trust Symfony.

Who created Symfony

Fabien Potencier, the owner of SensioLabs, founded the Symfony project in 2004. Fabien constantly looked for better ways to build websites:

At some point, you know, PHP 5.4 came along, it was about to be released. And for the very first time in my life, I was excited about PHP. So, I decided to give it a try and I started to look around for a good PHP framework. And of course, at that time there were none. But there were some nice libraries. Mainly a nice MVC implementation which was quite robust. And an active record library. So, I decided to create a glue between all those libraries. And eventually, that became Symfony version 1.

First, Fabien used Symfony to execute a few projects, and then he released it under an open-source license.

Symfony has come a long way since the time it was launched. It has a great active community, users, integrators, and other contributors willing to be a part of its continuous enrichment.

Projects using Symfony

If you choose Symfony, you’re in a good company .

En Marche !

The President of France, Emmanuel Macron, in 2016, launched a campaign to ask the public what was wrong with France. And Symfony was selected as the primary framework.

Facebook

Facebook is among the most well-known companies using Symfony. The API of the Facebook Ads application and the Instant Articles SDK technology is built with Symfony.

Porn hub

Symfony is used to support around 700 million requests at the same time.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! was one of the first Symfony users. The company adopted Symfony shortly after the initial release in 2005.

Spotify

Spotify uses Symfony to manage its users’ accounts. Symfony helps Spotify to handle more than 600 thousand requests every second.

BlablaCar

Symfony is used to manage the front-end and back-end of both BlablaCar website and the mobile app.

Course Hero

Course hero, one of the top education sites in the world with several million page views per day, was built primarily on Symfony.

Frameworks

Symfony components are also used in other web application frameworks, including Laravel, OroCRM, Akeneo PIM, Yii, and CakePHP.

CMSs

A number of CMSs have taken Symfony as their basis, including Drupal, Joomla!, Magento, and PrestaShop.

Reasons to use Symfony framework

How can the Symfony framework empower your business?

Here are key advantages that made Symfony one of the most trending frameworks:

• Fast development: Symfony enables quick development as a result of the minimization of duplicate actions. Symfony offers many of the common functionalities — there is no need to re-develop generic features.

• Security: As each major version of Symfony is supported by the maker for three years, the enterprise is not required to handle security-related issues.

• Reduced business expenses: Being open-source, Symfony helps to reduce costs. The only expenses implied are the work of the team and hosting.

• Refined MVC architecture: Model–view–controller (usually known as MVC) is a software design pattern used for developing user interfaces. It divides the related program logic into three interconnected elements: the logic code (called the Model), the presentation code (the View), and the request handling code (the Controller). Because the view layer is separated from the model layer, developers can easily make required changes with no trouble to the architecture.

• Components and bundles: There are two distinct features that make Symfony so popular, and they are components and bundles. All parts of the application are presented in the form of reusable blocks that provide additional functionality. Bundles and components allow you to create everything you dream about.

• Good documentation: Symfony provides excellent documentation that allows developers to save time when it comes to finding a proper solution for the software demands. It offers examples and is updated with every new version.

• Large community: Behind Symfony, there is a huge community of developers. Thanks to PHP enthusiasts, new components are created and issues are resolved.

• Regular updates: Symfony is a stable framework that gets updated regularly.

• Ease in testing: Symfony was created with testing in mind. It offers good toolsets for unit, functional, and behavioral tests.

To wrap up

With Symfony, you can create software ideally suited to your business. This framework is particularly known for its great performance and agility. It successfully bears the weight of heavy traffic.

We often recommend Symfony to reduce product development time.