Day 1 of learning Symfony

Long weekend. I’ll try to keep it short.

I’m a Zend Framework devotee. However Symfony is always on my to-learn list. I’m finally motivated today to give it a crack. Not to deny, a potential job lead also plays an important part in this.

I just spent the last 2 hours to download the library via SVN, follow the “Practical symfony” guide to setup a project and everything. All pretty straight forward. I’m on “Day 5″ of the guide now. I’ll stop here and finish the “tech” part of the day with this post (before my wife goes mad at me …).

So, what do I think about Symfony?

People talk about the steep learning curve of studying Symfony, but I didn’t find it’s too hard to follow. I think this is because of 2 reasons. 1, I understand the MVC pattern pretty well from my Zend Framework projects. 2, Symfony has got heaps of similarity to Ruby on Rails and I have finished reading my RoR book at the start of the year.

I quite like the Symfony view helpers, the YAML style configurations, the out of the box modular approach and the command line generators.

If time allows, I’ll blog more about Symfony in the future. For the next a couple of weeks or so, I might have to do some C#.Net for my next project.

Reference

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Categories: PHP - Symfony
Tags:
7 March 2010 at 15:51 - Comments
Danny
Yes please blog about it, have been avoiding SF until now. :-)
9 March 10 at 02:45
phil
Hi, so why learn Symfony? … can you blog about which is better, ZF or Symfony some time? I’m going to go for ZF at this moment and use your project of it with Doctrine.
12 March 10 at 01:29
phil
Hi, your missing a directory in your ZF project – data directory.
Warning: file_put_contents(C:\home\clients\expatjournal\website\expatjournal\application/../data/sf_services.php) [function.file-put-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in C:\home\clients\expatjournal\website\expatjournal\library\EM\Symfony\ContainerFactory.php on line 125
12 March 10 at 02:13
Jim Li
@phil reason why I’m doing a bit od symfony is
1. Get ready for experimenting symfony2 (waiting for xampp or zend server realease php 5.3.2).
2. Always interested in knowing how symfony works.
3. As I said in the post, a potential job lead.
Comparison between the 2 frameworks always comes down to case by case. And googling will give you a lot of info
12 March 10 at 08:43
Jim Li
@phil /data is in my .gitignore, I’ll check the readme and update accordingly. Thanks for picking it out
12 March 10 at 08:45
Hayden Adams
I’ve been using Symfony for past 3 years and find it one of the best frameworks for the rapid web development. You would probably spend sometime to get more familiar with it. But once you know it all, it’s so fast to show your client what they want and compete with others.
Symfony if very popular overseas but not sure why not in OS. I would say Zend is more popular because Zend is behind not because it’s better than the others.
11 June 10 at 10:34
Jim Li
Hayden, yes. I think you are right. Symfony is a very good choice for developing web apps. The reason I picked Zend Framework over Symfony is that the projects I’m doing are not always web apps. This gives ZF the edge, coz I can just pull components out of ZF and use them in whatever projects, web apps, backend batch jobs, or enhancement to existing legacy apps.

It’ll be great if you can share your tips and tricks on using Symfony.
11 June 10 at 10:53
Hari K T
Yes symfony is a wonderful framework that I love for its command line power . I don’t think there is much steep curve like learning zf :)
17 June 10 at 04:59