Development and music have a lot in common.
You know a good song when you hear one. It has great chords, melodies, and lyrics.
Similarly, killer software requires code that is readable, robust, and performant. It’s important to address these requirements from the beginning when its architecture is being mapped out.
And with Symfony, you can build a strong platform and customize it based on the user’s needs.
What is Symfony?
Creator: Fabien Potencier
Initial release: 22 October 2005
Repository: Symfony Repository
Written in: PHP
Operating system: Cross-platform
Type: Web application framework
License: MIT license
Website: symfony.com
Facebook: facebook.com/SensioLabs/
Twitter: twitter.com/sensiolabs
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/sensiolabs/
Symfony is a model-view-controller framework written in PHP that helps to build high-performance web applications.
Model–view–controller (usually known as MVC) is a software design pattern used for developing user interfaces. It divides the related program logic into three interconnected elements:
- The logic code (called the Model)
- The presentation code (the View)
- The request handling code (the Controller)
Because the view layer is separated from the model layer, making changes in the part visible to the user is much easier.
Symfony provides various options to write different types of web applications from simple websites to advanced REST-based web services. You can create entire applications or specific elements.
Who created Symfony
Fabien Potencier, the owner of SensioLabs, founded the Symfony project in 2004. Fabien constantly looked for better ways to build websites:
“At some point, you know, PHP 5.4 came along, it was about to be released. And for the very first time in my life I was excited about PHP. So, I decided to give it a try and I started to look around for a good PHP framework. And of course, at that time there were none. But there were some nice libraries. Mainly a nice MVC implementation which was quite robust. And an active record library. So, I decided to create a glue between all those libraries. And eventually, that became Symfony version 1.”
First, Fabien used Symfony to execute a few projects, and then he released it under an open-source license.
Symfony has come a long way since the time it was launched. It has a great active community, users, integrators, and other contributors willing to be a part of its continuous enrichment.
Brands that love Symfony
Symfony can be used to create projects of any size. This framework is used by many popular brands. The real-world examples of Symfony are:
Yahoo!
Yahoo! was one of the first Symfony users. The company adopted Symfony shortly after the initial release in 2005.
Facebook is among the most well-known companies using Symfony. The API of the Facebook Ads application and the Instant Articles SDK technology is built with Symfony.
Spotify
Spotify uses Symfony to manage its users’ accounts. Symfony helps Spotify to handle more than 600 thousand requests every second.
BlablaCar
Symfony is used to manage the front-end and back-end of both BlablaCar website and the mobile app.
Porn hub
Symfony is used to support around 700 million requests at the same time.
Course Hero
Course hero, one of the top education sites in the world with several million page views per day, was built primarily on Symfony.
Symfony components are also used in other web application frameworks, including Laravel and Silex.
Why do such big companies use Symfony for their web development?
Symfony is extremely appreciated by businesses due to a number of reasons:
- Components and bundles: There are two distinct features that make Symfony so popular, and they are components and bundles. All parts of the application are presented in the form of reusable blocks that provide additional functionality.
- Rapid development: Symfony aims to speed up development and replace repetitive coding tasks. It enables quick development as a result of minimization of duplicate actions.
- Security: As each major version of Symfony is supported by the maker for three years, the enterprise is not required to handle security-related issues.
- Easy maintenance: The compatibility of the new version of Symfony with the minor versions simplifies the web application maintenance.
- Regular updates: Symfony is a well-tested and stable framework that gets updated on a regular basis.
Final thoughts
Symfony is a top favorite for building web applications for businesses. It’s an ideal technology if you want to create a solution from scratch or add specific functionalities.
While developing apps, you can save both time and effort by using the Symfony ecosystem.
