Laravel vs Symfony – Which PHP Framework to Choose For Your Project?
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The web development ecosystem offers options and tools to ease the entire web development cycle. One of those tools that developers can easily choose from is the hypertext process (PHP) and its web frameworks.
Depending on the discretion of the team or developers, there are several frameworks to deploy. Developers have had to attest to the fact that web frameworks help to save time, ensure the reuse of codes, and ensure seamless collaboration, among other benefits.
Having conducted several web-related services in the past, the question that our clients keep pushing out remains the best or the most used PHP framework. These clients usually narrow their options to either laravel or Symfony.
Before diving into the Laravel vs. Symfony debacle, it is expedient to identify why the PHP framework stands out among other web development languages. For instance, languages such as Ruby have a singular or default framework; Ruby on Rails for Ruby, while Python has the Django framework.
Why is the PHP framework an exception? That is, having more than one default framework option to choose from?
Over the years, there has been no concise answer to the question. However, developers have continued to enjoy the privilege of varieties that comes with using the PHP framework. With over eleven options on the PHP frameworks that include CodeIgniter, Laminas project, Phalcon, CakePHP, Yii, and a host of others, Laravel and Symfony have continued to be the toast of all web developers.
Why Laravel or Symfony?
According to Rollbar, the best PHP frameworks to deploy for your application and web development are Laravel and Symfony. Followed by CodeIgniter, CakePHP and others. Inkblot has a similar ranking.
For developers and web development enthusiasts who have mixed feelings about Laravel vs Symfony, you can go through the following individual features;
Laravel PHP framework
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Laravel is an open-sourced PHP web framework. Developers have continued to deploy this framework due to its ease of usage and simplicity.
The Laravel framework helps to simplify the coding process. It follows the MVC pattern and reuses the existing elements copied from various frameworks. Be rest assured that with Laravel, you are developing a practical and structured web application.
The laravel interfaces are user-friendly and ease routine development tasks. These tasks include routing, authentication, and caching. Instead of the developer or developing team focusing on this routine development task, their focus is tilted towards high-end tasks.
Laravel is considered the framework for rapid development. It has a simple and attractive syntax that is easy to learn, read and maintain.
This framework, instead of being assembled in a single code repository, is decoupled into separate components and managed with a composer. This feature is peculiar to Laravel version 4 and its subsequent versions since 2013.
The foremost benefits of using this PHP framework are that you can write and reuse the codes (using an inheritance template by the blade), reduce overhead costs, and ensure high performance and greater scalability.
Symfony PHP framework
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Symfony is another backend framework of multiple PHP libraries. Symfony framework has reusable PHP elements toolkits that programmers can deploy to build fully-featured and highly sophisticated web applications.
Due to its MVC architecture, the Symfony PHP framework offers ease of usage. Developers do not have to provide some basic coding requirements. You can save time when using Symfony. If you want to build complex web applications, this framework has the versatility and reconfigurability features of such a task.
The Symfony framework is also in a decoupled component instead of a single code repository. So, as a developer, you can replace any of the components in a Symfony project or extract and use any Symfony component in a non-Symfony project. Albeit, this feature is available in Symfony 2 and every other version released since 2011.
The Symfony framework stands tall among other PHP frameworks due to its low memory/ storage usage. It is best suited for developing high-performing web applications and optimizing web performances. Symfony is also built with an MVC structure and supports all types of database systems.
Conclusion
The PHP framework remains one of the most popular server-side scripting languages for website development, applications, web files, and session tracking. The hypertext processor (PHP) framework helps to streamline and improve the workflow of every developer.
Instead of rewriting codes for the same functions, the PHP frameworks have libraries of pre-made codes to avoid repetition.
Furthermore, on the imbroglio of Laravel vs Symfony, having considered some of their best features, both PHP frameworks can be used for web development. However, they are built and best suited for different terrain.
While a small or medium size business can choose the Laravel framework for its project, it is advisable that a large business developing a high-performing web application with several developers should use the Symfony framework.
