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Symfony: Build PHP Applications with AJAX Effects and Usability

WebKnowHow
Thursday, May 4, 2006; 06:14 AM

Symfony is an actively supported open source web application framework for PHP5 projects. With it, development of PHP application does not need to start from scratch. It aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications, and to replace the repetitive coding tasks.

Symfony has AJAX helpers that make programming an elaborate interface easy. The project website at http://www.symfony-project.com has a dedicated section, explaining the creation of AJAX-powered Symfony application. It includes a video, detailing the development of a sample AJAX shopping cart. As a whole, the documentation is extensive.

Sympfony is easy to install: it requires a web server with PHP 5. It is compatible with most popular database systems. Creators claim that for people, used to PHP and the design patterns of Internet applications, the learning curve is reduced to less than a day.

The clean design and code readability keep the delays short. Developers can apply agile development principles and focus on applicative logic without losing time to write endless XML configuration files.

Symfony is aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context. Developers have full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. To match the enterprise's development guidelines, symfony is bundled with additional tools helping users to test, debug and document their projects.

Symfony's latest stable release is v0.6.2, released in April. It is distributed as a 1.2 MB zip source archive. The development framework is published under the MIT license. It is sponsored by Sensio, a French Web Agency.