New Project: Ruby on Rails or Symfony2 ( or other framework)

Question

I am about to start a new project and I am hung up on which language/framework to use. I've been a PHP programmer professionally, but it wasn't on the scale of this project. I've played around with RoR and i've been very impressed so far. Right now, the two leading candidtates are RoR and Symfony2.

My major hang ups with RoR: - i don't know ruby, or i hardly do. i can read it ok, but get stuck writing the code. - i've read complaints about it being slow, and it seems to be slow just at the CLI.

My major hang ups with Symfony2: - there's practically no documentation for it. Symfony1.x? sure..but not symfony2 - there's also little support. the BB on their site is like 80% spam. - went to install it on a local dev enviroment haven't been able to even get that running (see my first hang up)

this project will be fairly complex and go beyond the basic CRUD operations. it isn't under a super-tight timeline, but there is one. ~3 months for milestone1 which is basically a calendar, some financial organization stuff (not transactions with financial institutions, just personal finance organization type stuff), and a project manager/cms.

also, i'm open to using other frameworks, but symfony2 seems to be the best right now. if symfony2 had RoR's support/documentation/tutorials/etc it would be a no brainer.

i'm really interested in hearing what the stackoverflowverse has to say on the matter. im constantly impressed with the quality of the answers/replies on this site.

some other sub-questions (that are in my head right now): - if you recommend a different php framework, why? - what are you biggest gripes with any of the options mentioned?

i know CakePHP is the closest to RoR, but i've been reading that the models are a bit wonky (Many to many relationships and such).

right now, i'm leaning towards RoR. Simply put, i really want to learn it and it could do the job. i just don't know ruby and i've ready a lot of good about symfony2.

any advice you could offer will be greatly appreciated. thanks!

Answer 1

Personally, I'd recommend that if you're starting a new project which happens to be the largest project you've ever had to do then you should stick with what you know best. This happens to be PHP.

I've used Ruby or Rails. In fact, we have some production apps at our company that use RoR. The best way I learnt RoR was to work on small projects. I would never have considered to choose a programming language which I'm not familiar with and then on top of that learn a new framework to start coding a big project.

As for Symfony2, we started using it a couple of weeks ago. Symfony2 is an excellent framework and looks very promising. It's clean, nicely decoupled and fast. However, we ran into too many bugs/headaches/inconsistencies in Symfony2 to continue using it. We will start working on it again once it has matured and the documentation grows (lots of the docs are now out of date). Hopefully, they'll release some sort of Jobeet tutorial but for Symfony2.

Moving on to CakePHP. CakePHPs code base is old. In fact, it works fine on PHP 4.3.2. It doesn't take advantage of all the goodness that PHP5 has to offer (absract classes, interfaces, private & protected properties, exceptions, magic methods, annotations, pass objects by reference etc.) CakePHPs database abstraction layer, whilst it has had improvements, is not incredibly efficient once your database structures becomes too complex (many joins for example) it crumbles quite badly.

Moving on to Symfony 1.4 which I've used for many large projects

I enjoy using because:

1. PHP5
2. Event system
3. Dependency Injection
4. Caching system
5. Forms (nice integration into Doctrine 2) In fact, this is my favourite feature.
6. Many plugins (sfGuard for user management, for example)
7. Twig (nice templating language)
8. Highly configurable
9. Scalable (although not as fast as Symfony2)
10. A lot of documentation (Jobeet tutorial is great)

If PHP is for the moment your forte and you need to start working on a large project then start using a PHP based framework as you know the language syntax and functions the best.

Move onto RoR when you have a small project to do.

Just my 2 cents.

Best of luck.

Answer 2

To me Symfony2 has been great so far. Documentation is scarce compared to Symfony1.x but it's much easier to get started in Sf2 and, with things being very explicit, requires less knowledge of how the framework works internally.

There's an app/check.php script that will warn you of any dependency needed to run it, and support mostly happens in their mailing list which is very active (didn't even know there was a BB). Some components, like Twig, also have their own lists.