Which PHP MVC Framework for the enterprise; CakePHP or Symfony? [closed]

Question

I'm about to begin building a huge clinical healthcare application with PHP, and I'm looking for some advice on a framework. I need to be able to come up with a quick prototype, so it's important that the framework takes care of many mundane tasks; therefore, I've narrowed it down to CakePHP or Symfony.

I'm hoping to get a few developers opinions that have worked with both frameworks.

Thanks, Pete

Answer 1

IBM published an article here on both those frameworks along with Zend in a comparisson, see:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-php-fwk1/?S_TACT=105AGX44&S_CMP=ART

I personally use CakePHP, it's pretty awesome compared to just straight out PHP. Easy to build things in, very MVC focused, reasonable integration with third party components. I did have some issues with the lack of any sort of discernable upgrade path between versions though. I can't speak for Symfony, but I believe it's more heavyweight than CakePHP.

Take a look at the screencasts for CakePHP as well, they give a good overview:

http://cakephp.org/screencasts

Answer 2

I'd like to counter some of the arguments presented above. I've worked extensively with Zend Framework and symfony, and I've had a brief look at CakePHP.

First of all, compared to symfony, the ZF documentation is not "extensive" - its on the other hand quite superficial. Second, I think that the symfony community is much more available and helpful than the ZF framework in general, and the development process is much more transparent.

However, I agree that Zend Framework enjoys the advantage of being supported by Zend, which might be a powerful argument for enterprise projects.

In my experience symfony is more of a framework than ZF. In symfony you use the whole package - or the whole frame, while you in ZF is able to use tools to your liking, making it more like a "toolbox" than a framework.

Also remember that if you like some of the tools in ZF, you'll be able to use these in symfony (and probably also CakePHP) projects, alongside symfony/CakePHP.

This is not really an answer but more like a general comment to the answers given above.