I've chosen Symfony

A month ago, I've asked about which PHP framework to choose. Thank you very much for your suggestions, guys. After surfing and reading and testing and thinking and bla bla bla... I decided to stop with Symfony Framework (http://www.symfony-project.org). Curious why?

Well, I'm not a big expert in choosing PHP frameworks, but I can explain my choosing flow, if you want. Many of you guys suggested me to go with Zend. Well, yes, Zend looks solid, backed by PHP creators and all these things... big community etc... but Zend is more a collection of classes than a MVC framework, I wanted to start with pure MVC framework. Moreover, 45mb distrib isn't looking great for me... and ah... thanks to Drupal, I got used to Jquery so much that I didn't want to digg in ExtJs which comes with Zend.

My favorite was Kohana... but these project doesn't have a history, I don't know how is behind this project and they are asking for donation on their homepage - clear sign that things won't last for long. So I decided not to go with Kohana until it will become more mature. This is very promising project, but is unstable in terms of community and future.

Yii framework is in the same box as Kohana. Not sure in a stable future of this project.

Three more mature projects left. CakePHP seems to be very good, but I found many complaints about CakePHP, people aren't happy with its performance. So I decided to skip it for now. CodeIgniter - I tested it previously and was annoyed with a contstant creation of Model/Controller/View files by hand and decided not to go with it twice.

At last, I stumbled upon Symfony. During my searching process, I've often found nice comments about Symfony from various users and decided to try it out. People we're talking about great docs Symfony has and Yahoo used it to develop Delicious.com. So, I decided to give Symfony a try. So far, I'm very impressed, they have a very cool Jobeet site creation tutorial (http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/), which shows the power of framework step-by-step. And this is done not in a silly blog tutorial manner as most frameworks do, job listing site is a more complex structure than a blog, and following such a tutorial you can uncover many hidden features of the framework. Moreover, half of the coding work in Symfony is automated via cool console commands.

I'm not idealising Symfony at all. I just wanted to share my first impressions about exploring MVC world. And I'm not going to give up Drupal. Drupal is great for web sites development and I love it. I just want to find a handy tool to develop web apps with it, not websites. Drupal is for websites. For sure and forever.

Take care,
Tim