Symfony

Symfony

File:Symfony welcome.png Symfony2 Standard Edition welcome page
Developer(s)	Sensio Labs
Initial release	October 22, 2005 (2005-10-22)
Stable release	2.3.0 / June 3, 2013 (2013-06-03)
Preview release	2.3.0 RC1 / May 17, 2013 (2013-05-17)
Repository	github.com/symfony/symfony
Written in	PHP
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Web application framework
License	MIT License
Website	symfony.com

Symfony is a web application framework written in PHP that follows the model–view–controller (MVC) paradigm. Released under the MIT license, Symfony is free software. The symfony-project.com website launched on October 18, 2005.

Symfony should not be confused with Symphony CMS, the Open Source XML/XSLT content management system.

Goal

Symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications and to replace repetitive coding tasks. It is currently compatible with the following object-relational mappings: Propel and Doctrine.

Symfony has low performance overheads when dealing with an environment that supports a bytecode cache.

Symfony is aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context, and aims to 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.

Technical

Symfony makes use of many common and well understood design patterns, such as Model-View-Controller. Symfony was heavily inspired by other Web Application Frameworks such as Ruby On Rails, Django, and Spring.

Symfony makes heavy use of existing PHP open-source projects as part of the framework, including:

• Propel or Doctrine, as Object Relational Mapping layer
• PDO Database abstraction layer (1.1, with Doctrine and Propel 1.3)
• PHPUnit, unit tester
• Twig, Flexible templating engine
• Swift Mailer, a mail library

Symfony also makes use of its own components, which are freely available on the Symfony Components site for various other projects:

• Symfony YAML, a yaml parser based upon Spyc
• Symfony Event Dispacher
• Symfony Dependency Injector, a Dependency Injector
• Symfony Templating, a templating engine

Using plugins, Symfony is able to support JavaScript frameworks and many more PHP projects, such as:

• Prototype or jQuery, as JavaScript framework
• script.aculo.us, for visual effects
• PHP Less, a CSS parser based upon Less
• TinyMCE or CKEditor, for Rich Text Editing
• TCPDF, PHP library for generating PDF documents

As of Symfony release 1.2, no JavaScript framework is selected as the default, leaving inclusion and implementation of a JavaScript library to the developers.

Sponsors

Symfony is sponsored by SensioLabs, a French software developer and professional services provider. The first name was Sensio Framework, and all classes were prefixed with sf. Later on when it was decided to launch it as open source framework, the brainstorming resulted in the name symfony (being renamed to Symfony from version 2 and on), the name which depicts the theme and class name prefixes.

Real-world usage

Symfony is used by the open-source Q&A service Askeet and many more applications, including Delicious and the 20 million users of Yahoo! Bookmarks. As of February 2009, Dailymotion.com has ported part of its code to use Symfony, and is continuing the transition. Symfony2 is used by OpenSky, a social shopping platform, and the Symfony framework is also used by the massively multiplayer online browser game eRepublik, and by the content management framework eZ Publish in version 5. Drupal 8 also has incorporated components of Symfony in its next release.

Releases

Color	Meaning
Red	Release no longer supported
Green	Release still supported
Blue	Future release

Symfony manages its releases through a time-based model; a new Symfony release comes out every six months: one in May and one in November.
This release process has been adopted as of Symfony 2.2, and all the "rules" explained in this document must be strictly followed as of Symfony 2.4.

Each Symfony version is maintained for a fix period of time, depending on the type of the release.
A standard release is maintained for an eight months period.
Every two years, a new Long Term Support Release (aka LTS release) is published. Each LTS release is supported for a three-year period.

Version	Release date	Support	PHP version	End of maintenance	Notes
1.0	January 2007	3 years	>= 5.0	January 2010
1.1	June 2008	1 year	>= 5.1	June 2009	security-related patches were applied until June 2010
1.2	December 2008	1 year	>= 5.2	November 2009
1.3	November 2009	1 year	>= 5.2.4	November 2010
1.4	November 2009	3 years	>= 5.2.4	November 2012	LTS version. 1.4 is identical to 1.3, but does not support the 1.3 deprecated features.
2.0	July 2011		>= 5.3.2	March 2013	Last 2.0.x release was Symfony 2.0.23
2.1	September 2012	8 months	>= 5.3.3	June 2013	More components are part of the stable API.
2.2	March 2013	8 months	>= 5.3.3	November 2013	Various new features.
2.3	June 2013	3 years		June 2016	The first LTS release, only 3 months development, normally 6 months.

See also

• Comparison of web application frameworks
• Lime unit testing framework
• Zend Framework

Further reading

• Potencier, Fabien and Zaninotto, François. (2007). The Definitive Guide to symfony. Apress. ISBN 1-59059-786-9.
• Potencier, Fabien. (2009). Practical symfony (2009). Sensio Labs Books. Doctrine edition, ISBN 978-2-918390-06-0, Propel edition, 978-2918390077, and Spanish edition available on lulu.com.
• Fabien Potencier, Hugo Hamon: Symfony, Mieux développer en PHP avec symfony 1.2 et Doctrine, Eyrolles 2009, ISBN 978-2-212-12494-1, French
• Tim Bowler, Wojciech Bancer (2009). Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development, Packt. ISBN 978-1-84719-456-5.

External links

• Symfony Project Homepage
• Symfony 1.4 Documentation
• Symfony2 Homepage
• Symfony2 News Updates
• Symfonians.net - A Community of Projects Using the Symfony Framework
• Mobicules.com - CodeIgniter vs Symfony - quick roundup
• Symfony at Curlie