Symfony 2 or Symfony 1.4? [closed]

Question

I am starting a new Symfony project that will be very important to my company. My experience is only with Symfony 1.4. and I have 3 months to complete the project.

The project should be around for years and will grow to have many features. I know that many people are already using Symfony 2 in production, but do you think it's a bad idea to go with 1.4?

Every situation is different. I don't see any problem with 1.4, but some people are suggesting I use Symfony 2 because eventually we will need to upgrade and do a lot of rewriting of code.

Plus, there is Doctrine 2. I would be using 1.2.4. Again, I know that Doctrine 2 is really great, but am I going off a cliff by sticking with 1.2.4? It seems to do everything we need.

Thanks for any insight.

Answer 1

Why you should use Symfony 2.0:

• Faster. Many Symfony components have seen performance improvements and it also now supports edge side includes.
• Fixes weaker design. Symfony 1.x is great, but some components had flaws, like logging (now outsourced) and tasks (more flexible). Forms in 1.x were powerful, but had some flaws; forms in 2.0 are better.
• It's the future. Symfony 1.x will expire before the lifetime of your project. You already said you will be rewriting it. It makes no sense to wait.
• Cleaner, easier code. Namespaces, more decoupling, generally even more beautiful than Symfony 1.x was.
• Doctrine 2.0. Way faster, way easier to use.

The only possible reason to go with 1.x is time concerns. However, if this project is that important, it makes more sense to increase the time limit (if it is unfeasible), then to do it in 1.x and waste all that time rewriting it later.

Answer 2

Well, Symfony 2.0 should really be your bet if you had more time to get the project done. Symfony 2.0 developers are still struggling to learn the right way to use all those nice standards and best practices.

The community using SF 1.4 is already mature and has solved every single problem that all the common (and others not common) scenarios could present.

All those arguments about speed do not apply to 90% (or more?) of projects built on SF. Unless you need a high performance webapp (serving more than 500-1000 requests/minute), you gonna be fine using SF 1.4. If you need to serve more than that you can always using one more server to the scene. An optimized SF 1.4 app can perform pretty good.

I'm trying to say that all the talk about performance is not a problem for most apps. People do not think about it when raising the speed flag.

SF 1.4 is a well structured framework. It really speed things up during development. SF 2.0 is a community under development. People are still developing solutions and plugins for the most common problems.

I'm still using SF 1.4 for all my new projects. Mainly because I got a lot done on it that get my projects done really fast. All my customers don't need a high performance webapp, however I have my own projects that need to be fast and after optimization they really are.

Answer 3

I've struggled with this since 1.0. Ok great i finished my 1dot 0 project wicked fire it up...no wait there is now 1.1...ok upgrade go through all the upgrade troubles... ok cool NOW it's ready to go but no wait 1.2 is out now...FFS... ok upgraded everything to 1.2 struggled through learning this new forms class and plugin issues cuz sfGuard needs a new version blah blah blah... ok now we are ready to go fire it up but no wait...they've release 1.3 AND 1.4 on the same day WTH. Ok how bad is this upgrade going to be??? phpmailer good swiftmailer bad. or is it the other way around this time. Oh FFS what is this symfony2 all about now.....

I'm sure i'm not the only one that has gone through that (or similar scenario)

what matters is what YOU know and what YOU are good at. Symfony 2 i'm sure is great awesome best ever blah blah blah. But if it takes you three months to get up to speed and work all the bugs out that WILL come up. Then you're better to go with 1.4 and build on what you know.

I'm sticking with 1.4 because i have a large code base that i've built up that works just fine. As you can see by the varied opinions though the debate could rage on for a while.

That's my two cents anyway.