I first fell in love with Symfony in 2008.
I had just started a new job and someone introduced me to Symfony. At first, I thought it was hard to learn, but since I had just started the job and was trying to impress the new boss, I was determined to learn it and learn it well.
Symfony 1.0 was a joy to learn. I remember being SO excited about how easy and fast it made new website development. I couldn’t believe how quickly I could build a new website from scratch. The CRUD generation hooked me big time since building and validating forms is my least favorite thing to do. I loved it so much that I bought the book even though I already had the free ebook. I studied the book until it was literally falling apart.
When Symfony 1.1 came along, I was excited to see how much better things had become. Boy, was I disappointed. I found it very buggy and spent most of my time debugging and trying to figure out why things just didn’t work anymore. My website development became a nightmare instead of the dream it had become with version 1.0.
Thank goodness version 1.2 made life easier again. I wasn’t fond of some of the new changes, but at least it worked. The honeymoon was over, but Symfony was still the best thing going in my skill set. I decided to buy the new books, go through the Jobeet tutorial and learn all the new stuff. I was surprised that these appeared to be major changes with fairly steep learning curves. Maybe it’s just because I’m an old dog and you know what they say about teaching us new tricks.
When versions 1.3 and 1.4 were released I was still maintaining many 1.0 and 1.2 sites. I tried to learn enough about 1.3 to upgrade my sites, but found the learning curve to be even bigger since I felt I should move to Doctrine as my ORM. It was like starting from scratch again. I found myself, once again, buying a whole new set of Symfony books as well as the Doctrine book. The Symfony books were pretty good, but overwhelming with all the new stuff included in 1.3. The Doctrine book, for me, was very hard to follow and didn’t seem to help very much. Again, it could be that ‘old dog’ problem, but Doctrine really slowed me down. I was not a fan.
I had quit my full time job and was trying to make it on my own. I found myself constantly learning the new stuff that had been added to Symfony. I was constantly having to read new documentation or go back through the Symfony tutorials and manuals. I was spending so much time learning and re-learning that I didn’t have time to work on billable hours. So, I decided to write my own MVC framework so that I would know exactly how it worked and could easily debug my own code without having to read a half-dozen manuals or constantly search Google.
I found it quite easy to build my own MVC after working so closely with symfony. I will say that I tried several other php frameworks such as CakePHP and CodeIgnitor before I decided to build my own, so I had a fairly good working knowledge of what I wanted my MVC to do.
My little MVC has helped me build sites quickly again and I’m quite proud of the code. But, the other day an old client needed some new stuff added to their site. I found myself revisiting Symfony to build the new module. Once again, I fell in love with how quickly I could produce the code. I did not have the form validation nightmares with which I seem to always struggle — even with my little MVC. With the knowledge I had gained from writing my own MVC, Symfony seemed to make a little (or a lot) more sense.
So, here I am again. I am going to tackle Symfony2. This may be a short love affair because I may find that it’s just too much of a learning curve for which I may not have time. But, something tells me that this version is going to seduce me again.
I like what I see so far. I’ve been to Ryan Weaver‘s introduction to Symfony2 talk for the local PHP user group and I was, once again, impressed. Not only with Symfony, but with Ryan. He always does such a great job and I highly recommend his training. I’m excited that he is writing such beautiful documentation for Symfony2 to help me get started back up.
I find it much easier to learn something by sharing it with others or teaching. So, to hopefully make my new Symfony training stick a little better, I have decided to share what I learn here in this blog. That’s why I’m here. Writing seems to help me see things more clearly. Maybe you will gain something by reading too. You might just catch my Symfony fever!