symfony vs cakephp [closed]

Answer 1

Further to the existing answers, you should try both if possible. I use both quite a bit, and over some time, have come to prefer symfony.

but I'm fairly convinced that its not because one or other is better, but because symfony happens to suit the way my mind works better, its closer to what I do when I write software outside a framework, so feels more intuitive. I expect that others may find their mind fits the paradigm of another framework.

Having said that, I do think that cakephp's objects are a weakness, through the use of arrays rather than objects. (This is something that periodically develops into an intense hatred inside me whenever I need to do something that it makes hard ... ! ) They could do exactly the same, but return objects rather than arrays to represent data, and I think most of the issues I have would go away - you'd be able to add extra functionality into the data objects to achieve the things I want to do, rather than writing functions in the existing model class and passing them an array.

Answer 2

A big difference is in how models are created: CakePHP models are written in PHP, and Symfony models are written in YAML and powered by Propel. CakePHP's approach is more similar to ROR's ActiveRecord (although it isn't exactly an AR implementation). CakePHP, in general, is more rails-esque.

CakePHP's documentation and tools, in my opinion, have a wider target audience and the syntax and helpers are easier, but thy have yet to embrace PHP5 as their exclusive target (to autoloading isn't really there). In general, I prefer CakePHP's approach because it sort of follows an established standard, and I applaude it's organization. I'd also recommend Kohana for it's PHP5 goodness.

There's another post on stack overflow about this question, although its a bit different in focus.

Edit: I revisted Symfony to find the reasons I said 'no' and came up with these — your opinions and mileage may vary:

CakePHP also offers dead simple scaffolding and easy to understand CLI tools. Symfony's CLI syntax is a bit wonky to me, and 'CRUD' in Symfony just isn't the same. Combine that with Symfony's (awkard) action syntax and throw in Symfony's poorly designed (and challenging to understand) website, and preference for 3rd-party paid documentation (books on Amazon) and you have more ticks in the cons column.

Answer 3

Some of the claims about CakePHP and limitations above simply isn't true. The query is possible. You just have to know how to make it. The "automagic" of CakePHP is SUPER nice so you can hit the ground running FAST. It is BY FAR the FASTEST framework to development (hence why it's so closely modelled after RoR which obviously was a big success and buzz). There are more advanced behaviors to get data returned differently and make some of those more complex queries with a few short method calls and array parameters specified.

However. As far as I can tell, no other framework has as many "automagic" methods and classes. Cake takes the most common of tasks and provides an easy way to get it done. If you're really clever, you'll do most of your coding at the model level and make use of the app_model and app_controller file and have an extremely efficient application.

The console is great and always expanding. The community is truly amazing and there are many many contributions to help you get things rolling even faster. You can literally architect and then move "pieces" into place to build an app very quickly because most of what you'll need is available. You do not get that with any other framework. You have to spend a LOT more time coding usually.

Lastly. While the documentation was lagging, it is much better now and while Cake also got some harsh reviews during this lack of documentation and version 1.1 period...It was STILL good, just severely overlooked. With 1.2 and now Cake2 and Cake3 on the horizon...You're going to see a lot of opinions changing.

I have used CakePHP since 1.1. I'm a firm believer in it. I have used it for huge corporate sites. That receive millions and millions of hits per day...We're out of the realm of things like WordPress and Drupal for solutions. When you get to that level for a CMS type site, I am super glad to have CakePHP on it. Likewise, Symfony and CodeIgniter will help you with the scaling. I can't say anything bad about either of those frameworks either. I can only say that you will spend less time coding and find a larger community (and a super friendly IRC channel) with CakePHP.

Answer 4

The model layer of CakePHP is a mess. Try doing simple things like a many-to-many relationship between a Category and an Item object and then retrieve all the Items in a Category that have a specific property set.

Like:

SELECT items.* FROM items, categories, item_categories WHERE item.available=1 AND category.id=1 AND item_categories.category_id = category.id

Something so trivial is not possible in one statement in cake with the find() method of a model.

There is also no way in the core API to add a single many-to-many relationship as in one item to the item_category table above. There are a couple solutions online including a behavior that someone posted in the bakery (http://bakery.cakephp.org/articles/view/add-delete-habtm-behavior), but that's just stuff that any good ORM framework like Propel, Torque(Java), Hibernate(Java), SQLObject(Python), SQLAlchemy(Python) support right out of the box. Basically you're either going to have to write a lot of PHP code to add those missing features or use raw SQL queries but the main purpose of a framework is to avoid doing those things so that you can focus on the application that you're writing so you're not really gaining much with CakePHP.

There are a bunch of other problems and they all really have to do with the model layer including the form validation being tied into the model layer, having to deal with messy multidimensional arrays, having to use raw sql and tying your app to a specific database.

I would say use symfony. It's a bigger framework might take a few days longer to learn but it will be well worth it. I was going to use CakePHP for a project that I am working on, after running to too many of those types of issues I switched to symfony and it's been smooth sailing.

Answer 5

Cake 2.0 nicely autoloads most of the classes you need, whereas I found in Symfony 2 that every class had to have numerous imports at the top of the script. Attempting to memorize all those imports is near-impossible, so you always need a reference handy.

eg. Symfony 2 controller code...

namespace Acme\HelloBundle\Controller;
use Symfony\Component\HttpFoundation\Response;
// bunch of other imports accumulate here...

class HelloController {
    ...

Argh, yuck. While that may be good OO technique for the purists, it lengthens development time (bye bye RAD). At least with Cake I can code most of the simple stuff quickly from memory now.

Answer 6

• CakePHP philosophy is similar to Ruby on Rails.
• CakePHP is better for medium projects.
• CakePHP is faster to learn.
• CakePHP is lighter than symfony.
• CakePHP's Database Interaction uses CRUD.
• CakePHP uses the test system PHPUnit.
• Is interesting in CakePHP Bake and scaffolding.

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• Symfony's philosophy is each version is different.
• Symfony's is slower to learn.
• Symfony's is best for large projects.
• Symfony's Database Interaction uses Doctrine.
• Symfony's uses the test system PHPUnit.
• Is interesting in Symfony's Bundles and templates.