My story with Symfony

To be honest, there is first of all a personal reason why I chose Symfony in the first place. Being French, I was in contact with the first version of Symfony early, more than 10 years ago and have been using it since, progressing with the evolution of the framework. Symfony was originally developed by a Frenchman, Fabien Potencier, then was supported by his web development agency, SensioLabs. I don’t even remember exactly how I got to know about it but for sure it was easier for me to learn about its existence on French language websites. The fact that a documentation and French tutorials were available also helped.

I worked at that time (2002/2003) as a IT consultant developer for large groups in Paris (EDF, GDF, Alstom) and the standard for large business applications was Java back then. I was working on the maintenance and evolution of the code of existing apps created with Spring, Struts, Hibernate mostly.

In my free time, I sometimes developed personal websites (for example the Eklektik Rock webzine, which I rebuilt several times) and I used PHP for that, this language already seeming to me at the time easier to use in a simple local environment. I was trying out the different frameworks available, the first one I mastered was Mojavi, which I even adopted for a small project for a client back then.

When I decided to leave my job in Paris and move to Thailand, I had already discovered the first version of Symfony which was released in 2005. The transition from Java libraries that I used at work to an MVC framework like Symfony was quite simple, the modern PHP frameworks are very similar to Spring MVC, Propel (at the time the ORM proposed with Symfony, since replaced by Doctrine) had similarities with Hibernate.

By becoming a freelance, it seemed obvious to me that I was not going to continue to use the Java programming language, not that it would have been impossible for me but the ease of use and installation on inexpensive PHP servers, and the fact that Symfony was open source were obvious arguments in its favor. I was not working as a team anymore, I was working remotely for distant customers and I feel I made the right choice with Symfony, on the projects I worked on at the time (I started with a hotel booking app) but also in the long term because Symfony has evolved since then and is today in my eyes one of the best PHP frameworks. I guess it must also be used today by some of the teams of large French companies in which I worked 10 years ago.