Recently I tried Symfony 2 Sandbox for one of my projects. I realised this fact that Symfony 2 is so powerful because they restructured the Symfony 1.4 architecture and made a system like Codeigniter Framework.

I wrote a post some months back about Codeigniter vs Symfony here.

I need to re-edit that post now, because, the drawbacks I mentioned about Symfony (Advantage of Codeigniter over Symfony) is now rectified in Symfony 2.

Symfony was based on naming conventions till 1.4 (like, indexSuccess , deleteSuccess etc) but now in Symfony 2, like Codeigniter   you can mention the name of the view from controller.

The features like view inside view (instead of partials), controller inside view (instead of components) etc are really super in terms of template flexibility.

The Bundle method in Symfony 2 is adapted from the way of codeigniter libraries. (use_library)

The Bundles method also helps in reducing memory conceptions, which Symfony was being blamed for long.

Also the advantages of php 5.3 like namespace, use etc makes Symfony 2 , memory configurable.

The advanced template controller will help to play with any external templating systems very easily. The concept of slot is well used in Symfony 2.

The drastic change in Symfony folder structure will make Symfony developer hard to switch from Symfony 1.4 to 2. But once it is settled, it will be also hard  to go back.

The Symfony team claims that Symfony is faster than any other existing PHP framework available in the market. Must be true !!  But in the comparison page,   they avoided Codeigniter.  What could be the reason ?

– Sajith

I have developed more than 7 web projects using Symfony framework. Mobshare.in, Amvizone.com, Campaignmanger.in , Movieonline.in etc are some of the websites. But for the past 5 months my developement is in Codeigniter. It is very very lighter than Symfony and has almost all the features of Symfony. Both are MVC framework. But symfony has 4 layer while the latter has only two. Symfony uses modules (extra layer) for Controllers. But Codeigniter eleminates  that layer. It is similer to Ruby on Rails. 

Symfony uses naming convention to map controller and view. For example controller index need indexSuccess.php file as view or indexError.php as error. But in Codeigniter, we have to specify the view manually from the controller

$this->load->view(‘myview.php’); 

Symfony has command line tool to develop all the model classes. One thing you have to do is specify the scheme.yml file. But in Codeigniter, you have to make model classes from the scratch. However a lot of database operation libraries are available with it to make the coding life easier. Since we have to load each libraries manually, Codeigniter gaurantee the speed of execution. (Autoloading option is there, but in most of the case we can eliminate unwanted libraries from autoloading – just like execute on the fly)

There is no built in ajax and javascript function in codeigniter. But you can add it as plugin. Like Symfony it also has cache management, logs, testing, helpers, url rules, documentator, scaffolding etc

Codeigniter has a simple folder hierachy that everybody can understand and very less learning curve than Symfony. 

Go through this link if you wanna know about all the features of codeigniter : http://codeigniter.com/user_guide/toc.html

I found another interesting comparison of these two in : http://www.devtrench.com/codeigniter-vs-symfony/

Ruby Logo

I just started ruby on rails some week back. As a programmer one should learn at least the language ruby. It is a very powerful language with a lots of different concepts and stuctures . You may know learning a programming language is very simple if you cognise any other one already . What we want to learn is its syntax for conditions, declartions and looping.

A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write

Learn Ruby on Rails

Some Features of Ruby >

1. Ada like syntax
2. Exception handling (like java or python)
3. You can redefine ruby syntax

You can read more features here: http://www2.ruby-lang.org/en/20020101.html

Rails  is a mvc framework for web architecture . The architecture became very simple for me because I already has around 3 years of experience in symfony framework programming. But ruby seems more powerful when it stick on with rails as ROR .

For windows users, download ror (ruby on rails) from http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167

For linux users : http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p286.tar.gz

The getting started page of rubyonrails (http://www.rubyonrails.org/down) shows that you have to install ruby and gem separately. That is wrong. The gem modules are already included with the ruby package . So if you continues with ruby setup.rb as per the official site, you will get some errors.

You can simple install rails using gem. Gem is just like PEAR in php .

gem install rails

For those who are interested in ruby on rails programming, you can download full tutorial package include ruby and ruby on rails with a lots of example form  http://www.mininova.org/tor/1269847

This package ,  “Ruby Programming Ebooks 2008″ , contains  a lots of tutorial + Agile Web Development with Rails, The Pragmatic Programers (2nd, 2007).pdf book , Rails Cookbook, O’Reilly (2007).chm  (totally around 48 e-books)

(Remember it is a torrent, i don’t know about the copyright violation issue, i got it while searching on google)

Then start ROR today itself. Remember this post is only for programmers. For others forgot it, and it is not the  sexy ruby standing on the rails

Ruby Girl

Best wishes

Sajith