ANNOUNCEMENT: Bye bye Symfony.. Hello Zend

To set the scene, there are three major PHP based open source frameworks available out there: Symfony, Zend and CakePHP. All very good frameworks and more or less the norm for building successful social networks, although there are some exceptions to the rule.

The decision has been taken to STOP using Symfony for future projects. The reason is well described by one of the active collaborators of Symfony, François Zaninotto. “Important design choices are not discussed with the community, just like when symfony was only developed internally. 95% of the code base is still the result of a single man’s work and decisions”. François has now left Symfony, in his own words as he couldn’t get his views accepted. Although Symfony has now been adopted by Yahoo and is being used by major projects like (source) : del.ico.us, Yahoo bookmarks and Yahoo Answers (source) we feel the future of Symfony is not secure.

Our Issue

At this point its worth pointing out that we are responsible for developing social networks for our clients. To do so we had to choose one framework and role with it ! Our choice was Symfony because of the active community, good documentation and clarity. We should not forget at this stage that we have built several social networks using Symfony already: Voxswap, Finerday, Franchisemama, Playntrade (coming soon - wireframes), Kwiqq.com etc. Although after several debates internally and speaking with experts in the area we had no choice but to think of the consequences if the one man responsible for developing Symfony, Fabien Potencier, for some reason stops working on it.

Comparison Zend v/s Symfony

So we have decided to go with Zend and there is a lot of information available on Zend V/s Symfony. Most of points here are very technical and rightly so ! The best part of the article is the comment made by Will Sinclair of referring to the two frameworks:

“They are both excellent. The only thing is how u look on them. If you need something rapidly, if you don’t care about application layout nor how things are working than use SF. You will end up with big project in just a second. From the other hand if you want total customized application use ZF. The only problem ( I consider this very good because a lot of “developers” use rapid frameworks and they don’t know a sh**. Tell them to write for example MVC and they will not know from where to start.”

Why Zend ?

When it comes to Zend it has often been accused of not being a framework but a library of useful code. Although we feel it certainly is a component framework. Either way its useful tool for us especially because a major problem which we saw with Symfony was installing the framework requires root access or super user (that is not true as pointed out by Andy Farren - you can certainly Freeze Symfony). Which is fine in the normal scenario but what if you are building a product and want users to install the entire package easily using Wordpress like installer ?

Symfony and Zend usage:

Symfony definitely has more usage than Zend framework but check this out, Symfony see’s a drop in usage just after mid 2008:

Is it because people are realizing that Symfony is one man code job ? Is it because François Zaninotto left Symfony ? Either way we don’t want to risk future client projects Its unfortunate but its not worth the risk !

More articles on comparison between Symfony and Zend: IBM, Symfony Best PHP framework (18th Jan 2007), Prefer Zend (another article)

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: Zend, Symfony, PHP Framework, announcement, kwiqq