Symfony

Symfony is an open source PHP web application framework, initially inspired by Spring. It helps with building either full stack web apps or tiers in a microservice architecture. It is used in a number of commercial and open source projects, even in other web frameworks, like Laravel. Symfony consists of reusable components. A developer can decide for themselves which of them to use. Thanks to this, the apps are more compact.

The basic features are:

• Doctrine as ORM, thus the framework is data source independent;
• Ability to use a number of templating engines or pure PHP, with Twig as the default one;
• Routing management;
• Dependency injection simplifies the code and increases testability;
• Container-friendly: easily configurable to be deployed in a docker container
• Enforces good practices on writing secure apps;

Symfony by default comes with PHPUnit as the default testing framework both for unit and functional testing. However, its architecture perfectly fits to BDD and we at Kiwee use phpspec for unit testing and Behat for functional testing instead.

Symfony is frequently updated and has a stable roadmap. Each minor version’s end-of-life date is announced upfront.

Here at Kiwee it’s our framework of choice for PHP projects.

Symfony's Github page.