Symfony - PHP On Rails

When Sam Weiner decided to jump again into the enrepreneurial world (see Why Us and About Sam) the first thing he did was a careful survey of then existing development frameworks, followed by a detailed evaluation of several frameworks. Sam's goal was to find a technology stack which held close to his core beliefs - that while process and architecture are critical to Total Cost of Ownership and long term ability to compete, time to market pressures and resource constraints are just as real, if not moreso.

For this reason, Sam wanted to steer away from "accepted" technologies such as .NET and Java which, while capable of producing the fastest and most robust code, are also far slower to develop in than modern technologies such as Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails had been quickly gaining traction and sounded like the right approach, but Ruby is a relatively unknown language. PHP on the other hand is by far the most used language - with absolutely countless code examples available via a quick web search.

Enter the Symfony framework - essentially PHP on Rails. Again and again as Sam dug into Symfony he saw two things: that the framework was put together just as he would have done, and that it was easily possible to step outside of the framework and dive into low-level code to handle problems not envisioned by the framework creators.

A first real implementation for James Fahy Design proved that Symfony was extremely effective. Sam chose Symfony while it was still at version 0.82, and now has well over a year of experience with the framework. The framework comes with a fairly steep learnining curve, but once that's mastered it is capable of amazing things. Sam trained a team at NetWeb in the framework, and their success with Lightspeed is clear.

Symfony is now approaching version 1.2, and has been selected by Yahoo as the development platform for some of their new applications, such as Yahoo Bookmarks which has over 20 million users in multiple languages. With a team at NetWeb trained in Symfony, this rises to the level of a competitive differentiator for ObjectFrame.

With Symfony as the cornerstone, Sam selected a suite of open source tools an technologies including XAMPP (a packaging of Apache, PHP, and mySQL - the so-called LAMP stack which has grown to be capable of handling demanding production application loads), Trac for issue management, Subversion for source control, and so on. It is a free set of tools, which helps ObjectFrame be a low-cost provider of top-end software development, but it is equal to - in fact in some ways superior to - systems Sam has worked with which run $200K and up (Clear Case, AccuRev, Team Track, etc.).

Symfony applications can be hosted on ObjectFrame's powerful Verio Hosting platform, or deployed on most any Windows or Unix platform within your enterprise. Refer to Case Studies for a listing of ObjectFrame's Symfony implementations. For a listing of other Symfony based projects, see the Symfony Application List.