What is Symfony2?

OK - I get your point. I guess I'm still a bit confused about this:

..."it's fairly clear you haven't been as involved with the community over the past few years (or if you have, nothing in your comment gives that impression). Otherwise, you'd know about all the projects that are being launched/have been launched on top of frameworks. Open source projects, community projects using Zend, Symonfy, CI, etc.

What in my comment should give that impression? Maybe I still don't get it. Yes, there are projects being built on top of frameworks. (I started zfkit some time ago, although other people have done much more in that area than I have). I've done project work using various frameworks.

I'm not ragging on PHP at all, and don't really know where you got that from. To the extent I'm seemingly ragging on Symfony, it's only that it's complicated and doesn't speak to everyone's needs. Many people still really just need a type language to suit their small needs, and PHP works great for that (as well as works great for many larger scale projects as well).

Honestly, really, I hope you were reacting to someone else and I just got caught up in this as a misdirected target. I teach PHP for Zend, have certification, just got back from Zendcon, and use PHP for about 70% of my work (using various frameworks). I enjoy PHP too - again, not sure where you're getting some idea that I don't enjoy it.

Oh... yeah, I said that the language can't do some things I can do in Groovy (or Ruby). Yeah, things I enjoy and like. You know something, learning other languages has made me a better developer, both in PHP and in those other languages, because I can appreciate idiomatic PHP as much as idiomatic $lang. PHP's taken some cues from other languages and implemented neat things, some of which make things easier. I still don't like the syntax of things, and we don't have the same sort of metaprogramming facilities I enjoy in Groovy. But I'm not complaining - I love them both equally.

What does annoy me is that people can't put out a "negative" view of PHP without raising the sort of rant you just posted here. Just because someone points out that PHP is missing something, it's not an automatic assault on everyone who uses PHP, nor is it stating that everyone who uses PHP is somehow an incompetent idiot. I'm pretty damn impressed with some of the stuff I see from people in the PHP community after all these years. I do wish some of them would at least acknowledge that other languages/platforms have some cool stuff in them too. That's happening, but far more slowly than I'd like to see. Even at Zendcon, there was a bit of an "us vs them" mentality I picked up in the hallway comments, and that saddens me.

At a CF conference a couple years ago someone brought up PHP and made some joke about people needing training wheels. WTF - this from a language that didn't allow user defined functions for the first X years? And somehow you think PHP is a 'toy'? Every platform/lang has pros and cons, and the factionalization and party politics are really starting to get me down - it's actually part of the reason I don't get in to various frameworks too much (I marginally use ZF as a default unless there's some reason not to). Even inside PHP, the framework zealots like to bash each other's frameworks (Cake vs ZF vs Symfony, etc) - they all suck and are all great - just use something and get your job done.

re: Diaspora - I'd say a year ago, public criticism might have had a chance of changing direction to get something more valuable out of it. Today, yeah, public criticism is pointless, as it is for more frameworks - you either like it or you don't, and move on.

So.. yeah, this was a big rant reply. You triggered a lot of thoughts, but overall, I think we're in agreement about a lot of things. People often dismiss PHP as a toy still - but PHP people do it to others as well (listen to PHP people dismiss Perl, Java, etc).

I have a few years experience with CakePHP, Symfony 1 and I have also been playing around with Ruby on Rails a bit.

Now, I just finished going through the Symfony 2 internals to see what is so different from Symfony 1. I have to say that, when I realized the paradigm change, I had a WOW moment.

I mean most of the frameworks gravitate around the classical "MVC monilith active record framework" and they all resemble more or less Rails.

Symfony 2 isn't even a MVC framework (although it separates concerns very well), I mean it doesn't even have a Model!!!

At the core it's a Kernel object that is responsible for building a Service Container for dependency injection, into which all sorts of Components get pluged-in as services. And along the way it triggers lots of events to which you can attach listeners.

That's it! Everything else you augment by choosing the kind component you want to use and by configuring the Service Container.

After the little bit I played around with Ruby on Rails I have to say that Ruby is much nicer then PHP, but as a framework I really like where Symfony 2 was taken.

I generally use Java and Scala for my own personal projects. Scala less than I'd like because there's no really good solution for web development aside from Lift (and Lift, while comprised of fantastic code, doesn't map well to my mental model of web development), but moving more and more towards it over time.

Some Python too, but that's more for one-offs.