As any developer can attest, the complexity of websites has increased massively over the past decade.
And after writing thousands of lines of code, over hundreds of hours, starting from scratch each time, improved PHP frameworks have become sanity-saving technology assistants that not only increase productivity but boost efficiency.
And as technology continually evolves to promote rapid application development, we can reduce the number of hours we spend writing repetitive code.
While the value of saved time is immeasurable, there are numerous attributes to employing PHP frameworks, including the ease and flexibility in creating structured and streamlined development for web applications.
Including the PHP framework Symfony.
What Is Symfony?
Symfony is a PHP framework that has allowed developers to follow the standards of PHP and web development completely since 2005.
Symfony’s ecosystem is huge and is supported by an active community of developers, which showcases its components through many popular content management systems, including Drupal, PHPBB, WordPress, Magento, and OroCRM, to name a few.
When it comes to large-scale enterprise development projects, Symfony allows developers to complete a wide variety of tasks including authentication, templating, and object configuration that is adapted to the specific requirements of its users.
Why Should I Use Symfony?
The simple answer is because it’s awesome.
Technically speaking, because it makes life easier through:
Time-Saving Technology
Highly Flexible Bundles & Components
Unique Maintenance & Stability
Sound Security
Easy Use & Testing
Database Support
Documentation Support
Community Support
Time-Saving Technology
The classic web design pattern is known as the Model View Controller — or MVC — fundamentals, is an architecture that breaks apart the domain logic that handles the information exchange from the database to the user interface.
Developers can save a significant amount of time by using Symfony, thanks to the built-in features that eliminate coding time while designers can access the UI separately, promoting true agency collaboration.
Most modern PHP frameworks follow the MVC pattern to ensure the separation of presentation and logic to promote modern web development practices. Symfony adds the attributes of consuming less memory while creating a robust, high-performance application.
Highly Flexible Bundles & Components
Symfony is one of the most feature-rich PHP frameworks, thanks to its highly flexible bundles and components.
The Symfony bundles provide PHP files, stylesheets, and images as packages that are decoupled, which means we can reconfigure and reuse them for multiple applications — reducing the overall development cost.
Symfony also currently comes with thirty components that allow developers to independently add custom modules without interrupting the architecture. It makes it easy to pick and choose which features to enable in the application and optimize them the way we want.
Database Support
Symfony 2 and later versions support Composer, which provides a standard format for managing dependencies of PHP software and required libraries.
This tool dependency manager allows us to:
Declare the libraries we depend on
Determine which versions of which packages can and need to be installed, and installs them into our projects
Autoload capabilities for libraries and third-party code
This well-adapted technology allows us to eliminate dependencies in the architecture, so it is easier to make changes without disturbing the integrity of the web application’s skeleton.
Unique Maintenance & Stability
The latest version, Symfony 4.3, is built with the latest components which are tested in all popular PHP projects comprising more than one billion downloads.
Symfony is supported by SensioLabs, which combines its dedicated developer experience with long-term maintenance and scalability. The framework is well tested with regular updates and offers three-year support for some versions while prioritizing functional advantages by making it more compatible with public APIs.
Sound Security
Security is a priority for developers all over the world, including ours, and with Symfony’s timely updates and lifetime support for security-related issues, it becomes an easy choice among PHP frameworks.
What’s more, the directory structure in Symfony contains separate writable folders that securely house:
The app directory: The main entry point of the application configuration
The web root directory: Access to public files, including images, stylesheets, and JavaScript
The vendor directory: Home to third-party dependencies
These tools resolve errors and security issues to improve productivity, which ultimately leads to faster, bug-free development.
Easy Use & Testing
Symfony is often preferred by advanced developers, but the framework has embedded best practices to help beginners learn quickly too — thanks to its resourceful documentation and community support.
There are also tools for functional, behavioral and unit testing that are easy to use, which automates functional testing that saves a significant amount of time and effort for developers.
Documentation Support
Symfony has a comprehensive library of detailed documentation that is beneficial to new and seasoned users alike.
The documentation is simplified with examples and is well explained to provide easy configuration and caching to enhance the application’s performance.
Community Support
The Symfony community is comprised of over 600,000 highly active developers spanning more than 120 countries who provide tutorials, structured Q&A resources, real-time support, and advice through online chat, and events, and meetups around the world.
At Stauffer, community involvement is important to us. So is our commitment to our clients, professional partners, and team members in our quest to develop some of the best digital products available. If you would like to learn more about our services and company values, we are only a click away.
Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash