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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCING SYMFONY, CAKEPHP, AND ZEND FRAMEWORK
tested agile codebase. Zend Framework is focused on building more secure,
reliable, and modern Web 2.0 applications & web services.”
Now see whether you can spot three differences. Well, the websites are not really informative about
unique features of their frameworks. You can fi nd more in various blogs and forums, but still there
is little verifi ed data, and general discussions tend to exchange purely personal opinions.
That is why we have written this book. In fact, the differences between frameworks are not really
obvious, and it takes some time and practical examples to see them and then harness them in busi-
ness solutions. Let’s begin with some most basic facts.
Symfony
Started: 2005
License: MIT
PHP versions:
‰
Symfony 1.4: PHP 5.2.4+
‰
Symfony 2.0: PHP 5.3+
Its logo is shown in Figure 1-3. Website:
www.symfony-project.org
Symfony was produced in a French web development company, Sensio Labs, by Fabien Potencier.
First it was used for the development of its own applications and then in 2005 it was released as an
open source project. Its name was “symfony,” but it is sometimes capitalized (as we do in this book)
in order to make it more distinct.
Symfony was based on an ancient Mojavi MVC framework, with some inevitable infl uences from
Ruby on Rails. It also integrated Propel Object-Relational Mapper and took advantage of the
YAML Ain’t Markup Language (YAML) serialization standard for confi guration and data model-
ing. The default object-relational mapping (ORM) solution has been later changed to Doctrine.
Today Symfony is one of the leading web frameworks. It has a large active community and a lot of
documentation — mainly free e-books. Symfony 2.0 is being released in late 2010. It offers various
new features and greatly enhanced performance.
CakePHP
Started: 2005
License: MIT
PHP versions: 4.3.2+
Its logo is shown in Figure 1-4. Website:
http://cakephp.org
FIGURE 13: Symfony logo
FIGURE 14: CakePHP logo
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