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Mar/11

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What I like about symfony 1.4 will be my benchmark for Symfony2

6 Comments · Posted by Christian in The right tool

I am consulting a lot of web projects at work as well as privately and one of the common questions is the one for which technology to use.

The technology of my choice has for the past four years been PHP and symfony 1.4 with doctrine but recently I have started to get in touch with Symfony2.

So a new questions pops up every now and then: shall we use symfony or Symfony?

I raised this topic already just a few days ago by asking “Who should use Symfony2 now?“. But I want to try a different angle mainly for myself to get some thought sorted.

The main idea is: If I should favour Symfony2 over symfony then it should be better. So I want to list what I think symfony is good at and take that as a benchmark for Symfony2.

The following things conviced me of symfony 1.4.

 

  1. Scaffolding and the admin generator
  2. The plugin system
  3. Support of several environments
  4. Schema driven modelling
  5. The configuration cascade

There are more things but I think these are the main ones.

This can be further condensed to:

 

  • Development speed (scaffolding, admin generator and schema driven modelling)
  • Flexibility (plugins and configuration cascade)
  • Sense of safety (environments)
From my current experience with the not yet released Symfony2 I can say:
  • (+) Bundles are more flexible and concise than plugins
  • (   ) Environments are still supported
  • (+) The configuration cascade is replaced by the flexibility for you to do what you want
  • (+) You can still model from schemas in Yaml, XML or PHP, via annotations or directly generate everything from the database
  • (-) Scaffolding does not fully exist yet and as long as the forms are not finished there can not be a final admin generator (although there is BaseApplicationBundle in development)
If you do the maths Symfony2 should win. But then there is the factor of feeling familiar with the framework which in many cases will favour symfony 1.4 which might be relevant for projects with close deadlines.
For my own projects I will choose Symfony2 because I can take my time and during that I will become familiar with it. But if colleagues ask me who are familiar with symfony 1.4 already and who have to work on real world projects I can not really advise to do the same yet.
Especially scaffolding and the admin generator are a turbo boost to development speed and do not have a fully grown counterpart in Symfony2 yet. The existing admin generator for Symfony2 (BaseApplicationBundle) will not even be included in the first stable version afaik.
So while there are projects which should be done in Symfony2 there are just as many things to consider that can move a decision towards symfony 1.4 still.

 

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  • http://www.ajado.com stoefln

    Hi Christian!

    I will have to make a decision about next week, which framework to use for our project, which will have it’s public beta release in october.
    I would so much prefer Symfony2 (over Zend, which would be the other choice), and I’m willing to take quite some extra effort for building on a not-yet-stable framework, but as a decision maker I’ve the responsibility for the whole project.
    As far as I see, making assumptions regarding release dates for a RC1 of Symfony2 is just guessing, but since you are far more experienced with the symfony project in general, I would be interested in your guess:
    Do you think the RC1 version will be a matter of weeks or months or would you even say that a possible release date is in 2012?

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @stoefln to my knowledge RC1 is still planned for end of this month so I guess it’s a matter of weeks.
    That being said I also heard that the security component as well as the BaseApplicationBundle will not yet be included. They are still available on github of course.
    But I am very convinced that Symfony2 will be available soon (first half of the year at least)!

  • http://www.ajado.com stoefln

    Cool!- didn’t know that it’s still planned for end of march.
    It’s really no big deal for me to live without scaffolding and 100% stable API, but I will def. need forms from the beginning. Fortunately Twig, Doctrine and routing are in place, so the form-framework (and maybe security) is the only thing which stops me from getting productive…
    Exciting times!
    Cheers Steph

  • http://pooteeweet.org Lukas Smith

    Right now the main hold up is the form rewrite, which is supposed to be complete towards the end of next week. Or actually that is more or less the deadline that was set. Then I expect it to take another 1-2 weeks before RC1. So we are now slipping into early April for RC1. But aside from the form stuff there will not be any major changes anymore.

  • pad

    So.. at the beginning of March Fab Pot said that they need one month… one month 1/2 more for final release…

    http://youtu.be/TEKdjlwgeF0

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @Lukas what was the decision about eager response and REST ?

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