What is Symfony?

A PHP web framework is a collection of classes, which helps to develop a web application. Symfony is an open-source MVC framework for rapidly developing modern web applications. Symfony is a full-stack web framework. It contains a set of reusable PHP components. You can use any Symfony components in applications, independently from the framework.

Symfony has a huge amount of functionality and active community. It has a flexible configuration using YAML, XML, or annotations. Symfony integrates with an independent library and PHP Unit. Symfony is mainly inspired by Ruby on Rails, Django, and Spring web application frameworks. Symfony components are being used by a lot of open source projects that include Composer, Drupal, and phpBB.

The Symfony framework consists of several components, such as the HttpFoundation component that understands HTTP and offers a nice request and response object used by the other components. Others are merely helper components, such as the Validator, that helps to validate data. Kernel component is the heart of the system. Kernel is basically the ‘main class’ that manages the environment and has the responsibility of handling a http request.

Symfony’s well-organized structure, clean code, and good programming practices make web development easier. Symfony is very flexible, used to build micro-sites and handle enterprise applications with billions of connections.

Symfony Framework - Features

Symfony is designed to optimize the development of web applications and grows in features with every release.

Some of the salient features of Symfony Framework is as follows −

• Model-View-Controller based system
• High-performance PHP framework
• Flexible URI routing
• Code reusable and easier to maintain
• Session management
• Error logging
• Full-featured database classes with support for several platforms
• Supports a huge and active community
• Set of decoupled and reusable components
• Standardization and interoperability of applications
• Security against cross-site request forgery and other attacks
• Twig template engine

Symfony offers a lot of flexibility to developers. It has great features for debugging, code readability, and developing extensible programs.

Symfony is a full-stack web framework; it is a very effective tool for creating web applications. Numerous companies offer Symfony services to clients.

Following are some of the benefits that you get by using the Symfony Framework.

• Microframework − Symfony can be used to develop a specific functionality. You don’t need to redevelop or install the entire framework.
• Reduces development time overhead.
• Extremely mature templating engine and quickly delivers content to the users.
• Compatible and extensible − Programmers can easily extend all framework classes.

Symfony Framework - Applications

Symfony components can be used as a part of other applications such as Drupal, Laravel, phpBB, Behat, Doctrine, and Joomla.

• Drupal 8 − Drupal is an open source content management PHP framework. Drupal 8 uses core layers of Symfony and extends it to provide support for Drupal modules.
• Thelia − Thelia is a Symfony-based e-commerce solution. Initially, Thelia was written in PHP code and MySQL, however, it was lagging to produce faster applications. To overcome this drawback, Thelia integrated with Symfony to develop the applications in a customizable way.
• Dailymotion − Dailymotion is one of the world's largest independent video entertainment website based in France. Once they decided to migrate open source framework with a large community, Dailymotion developers decided to use Symfony components features for its flexibility.