Symfony is a free and open-source PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP component
libraries. It was publishe
d as free software on October 18, 2005, and released under the MIT License.
Goal[edit]
Symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications and to replace repetitive coding tasks. It’s also aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context, and aims to give developers full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized.[2] To match enterprise development guidelines, Symfony is bundled with additional tools to help developers test, debug and document projects.[3]
Symfony has a low performance overhead used with a bytecode cache.
Technical[edit]
Symfony was heavily inspired by the Spring Framework.[4][5]
It makes heavy use of existing PHP open-source projects as part of the framework, including:
- PDO database abstraction layer (1.1, with Doctrine and Propel 1.3)
- PHPUnit, a unit testing framework
- Twig, a templating engine
- Swift Mailer, an e-mail library
Symfony also makes use of its own components, which are freely available on the Symfony Components site for various other projects:
- Symfony YAML, a YAML parser based upon Spyc
- Symfony Event Dispatcher
- Symfony Dependency Injector, a dependency injector
- Symfony Templating, a templating engine
Sponsors[edit]
Symfony is sponsored by SensioLabs, a French software developer and professional services provider.[6] The first name was Sensio Framework,[7] and all classes were therefore prefixed with sf. Later on when it was decided to launch it as open-source framework, the brainstorming resulted in the name symfony (being renamed to Symfony from version 2 and on), which matches the existing theme and class name prefixes.[8]