Symfony, High Performance, PHP Framework for Web Development

Symfony is an open-source rich-featured back-end PHP web app framework for developers seeking a simple and elegant toolkit for building full-featured web applications. It works with an independent library and the PHP Unit.

Symfony has grown since recent years, and many businesses are now using Symfony web framework for web applications in PHP. Symfony is greatly influenced by web application frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, and Spring.

To build a web solution it’s surely important to select a good framework. So what makes Symfony the choice for PHP web development?

Firstly, let’s see what is Symfony Framework.

Symfony website itself describes it as a set of PHP Components, a Web Application framework, a philosophy, and a community – all working together in harmony. The philosophy behind Symfony is to help create software that streamlines the entire product development process for the developers.

Why choose Symfony Framework for PHP Development?

• Flexibility 

As mentioned above, Symfony is a rich-featured flexible framework. It has two most striking technological benefits: Bundles and Components. 

Bundles can be reused and reconfigured further for many applications to reduce the general development cost. 

Components help reduce routine tasks as they can be used independently by adding your custom modules without hurting the architecture. There are 30 Symfony components that smoothen the web development workflow. 

• Customization 

Symfony provides a diversity of features that attracts many businesses and developers to choose it, including as a user-oriented web application tool. 

The framework has a full stack that helps build a complex product with multiple functionalities, as well as, you can create your custom framework if you wish to build an application with specific features and functions.

*Fun fact: Symfony was used for Emmanuel Macron’s political movement “En Marche!” in April 2016. 

• The community support 

Symfony as an Open Source project has a big whole international community taking care of the framework development. Every year Symfony takes first place among the most popular frameworks. It’s a trustworthy framework according to its popularity and results.
 

• Compatibility with databases

Whatever database you use for the storage of content, files, and documentation, it’s highly likely that Symfony can work with that. This framework supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and other PDO-compatible databases.

• Beneficiary MVC architecture 

The true benefit of using MVC with Symfony is that the developers get the liberty to easily separate the Model (business logic) and View (user presentation), allowing for better maintainability. 

Is Symfony the best PHP framework? 

With many advantages, Symfony is a very convenient choice, but let’s do some comparison to see whether Symfony wins over other popular web frameworks.

Symfony vs Laravel
Laravel Framework appears ideal for projects where you need to develop quickly an app without spending much money. When you download Laravel, you get many ready-to-use implementations that simplify your work.

In short, both Laravel and Symfony are great for web development. The choice between the two is determined by the business requirements and the features you want to add to your app.

If you want to develop a simple web app with minimum expenses and in a short time then you need to search for the Laravel development company. Whereas Symfony perfectly suits complex web apps or long-term development projects that require unconventional development approaches. Symfony may also be a little faster than Laravel.

Symfony vs Zend
Zend is a PHP object-oriented web framework by design. It enables developers to complete various web development tasks by selecting from different professional PHP packages. It also supports the MVC architecture. As a result of keeping the user interface and business logic layers separate, developers can create and sustain PHP applications more effectively. 

In this case, Symfony is a winner in terms of templates, plugins, database modules, and a clean mastering curve. On the other hand, Zend is also being used by many developers depending on the requirements. So one can use any framework depending on the project requirement and client budget.

Symfony Framework Examples
To fill in the list with more informative facts, let’s take a look at the most famous projects/sites built with Symfony PHP Framework:

1. Spotify
This had to be on top of the list. Spotify is one of the most famous sites/apps. It utilizes Symfony for the maintenance of its 75 million users, which are active all the time. Symfony helps Spotify to handle approximately more than 600 thousand requests every second. 

It even helps to overcome the massive traffic that comes through smartphones. Symfony PHP framework helps in developing a robust and elastic platform conveniently.

2. Trivago
This is a great site to use for checking and comparing hotel prices. Millions of people do it regularly.

The website has heavy traffic on its search option, and thus it is the most famous part of Trivago’s webpage.

Trivago’s team has selected the Symfony PHP framework so that their visitors and clients can have the best experience searching and comparing hotel prices.

3. Doc Planner
Around 7 million patients visit this site faithfully, whenever they need to find a specialist doctor near their house. People can browse the list of more than 1.4 million doctors' data and fix their appointment at their convenience.

The team of Doc Planner has decided to enhance their user experience with Symfony PHP Framework.

4. Vogue France/Netherland
I hope you are as surprised, as I was when I learned about it. The most popular fashion and style magazine brand uses Symfony to give the best experience to their clients and visitors and also so that they can increase the number of users on their website. That definitely works!

5. Dailymotion
The next great and most famous example of Symfony PHP Framework is Dailymotion. It is one of the largest video activity websites in the world. There is massive traffic on the website of Dailymotion and is browsed by more than 42 million users.
Such users search for more than 922 million online videos and maintain the quality of experience, and the team has chosen the Symfony framework.