Following the recent departure of one of its key collaborators, Francois Zaninotto, Symfony has taken a fair bit of stick and has seen some users abandon the web app framework in favour of alternatives such as Zend.

It seems Francois’ frustrations with the closed nature of Symfony development (he says 95% of decisions are made by one man - creator Fabien Potencier) finally outweighed his enjoyment of working on the project, prompting him to leave (more details can be found at Redo The Web, Francois’ blog).

Despite boasting some pretty high profile users (Yahoo Bookmarks and Askeet to name a couple) and thousands of smaller ones (see this Symfony list of some of the key sites built on the framework), the initiative is seeing a slight increase in criticism, namely from some web 2.0 developer’s blogs.

It seems they too are also growing concerned that the majority of Symfony work is done mainly by Potencier, although the software is opensource and boasts a fairly decent development community. Kwiqq.com, a social website builder, has recently announced their decision to move away from Symfony to Zend, highlighting the slight but nonetheless noticeable drop in SF usage levels around the time of Francois’ departure (see their blog for more info).

Despite still having a slightly higher usage level overall (than Zend) it seems SF’s numbers are currently heading in the wrong direction (though it is unlikely to be more than a brief downturn).

However the key point is that SF offers users much that its alternatives cannot - the very reason it is still so popular despite these (exaggerated) doubts over its future. Creating large-scale projects quickly is always easier with SF and the learning curve, especially in relation to PHP requirements, is far more forgiving; Zend for example requires some pretty advanced PHP skills in order to use effectively.

Symfony’s low performance overheads, plus its minimal pre-requisites (Unix, Mac OS, or Windows with a web server and PHP 5) make it accessible and quick to get running. Yes its true the community is not as broad as with certain other open source initiatives (let’s not forget its still pretty useful - check it out here), but the fact remains that Symfony still does what it has always done, with or without Francois; it allows you to build ambitious large scale web apps quickly and effectively (especially social networks), and it is free.

The question really should not be about choosing which is better of Zend or Symfony or any other for that matter, but rather in understanding the strengths of what is out there and when to use which option. Ultimately all of this software is free so to criticise it in any way other than with constructive feedback is to totally miss the point of the whole concept.

As for us here at etonDIGITAL, we intend to continue using SF just as we have always done in the past (see our ‘featured work’ section for a full list of our recent projects, including the professional social network Skipso) and being grateful for its services. Its main creator Fabien Potencier is firmly committed to the project, as is his six-strong dedicated development team and its sponsor Sensio Labs. Francois’ departure will be felt in that a talented and creative member of the team has left - but as his blog post title (’no-one is irreplaceable’) makes clear, this is not some crisis of staffing and organisation at SF but merely the natural merry-go-round of human resources…

Dejan Levi
www.etondigital.com