While many people or developers are rapidly adopting for Symfony2 development, there has been a strong debate among the developers about how Symfony2 differs from Symfony 1.4. Many developers argue that there is a slight difference between Symfony 1.4 and its successor, but opinions generally vary from one to another.
Each and every developer may have different preferences when it comes to the coding style and the types of applications they’re developing. This could have significant impact on the choice of Symfony framework versions. Are you planning to move from Symfony 1.4 to Symfony2 development? If the answer is affirmative, it is important that you know the basic differences between both these frameworks.
With this thought in mind, we’re going to discuss the major differences between Symfony 1.4 and Symfony2. Also, we’re going to cover the advantages of Symfony2 over Symfony 1.4.
The difference between the two versions:
Autoloading –
One of the biggest benefits of modern framework is that you don’t have to worry about requiring files. With the help of the autoloader, you can refer to any class within your project without worrying about whether the file is available or not.
On the other hand, in Symfony1, autoloading was performed by searching the entire project for the availability of PHP web development class files and caching such information within a huge array. This array lets Symfony 1 know which file contains each class. In the production environment, this caused you to need to clear the cache when classes were added or moved.
In contrast with In Symfony 1, Symfony 2 performs the entire process with the help of a tool called Composer. The main concept behind autoloader is quite simple: the name of your class must match up with the path to the file containing that class. Autoloading has changed in Symfony2 to be more universal, faster, and independent of needing to clear your cache.
Console –
While the console is in the root directory of your project and is called Symfony in Symfony 1, the console is now in the app sub-directory and called console in Symfony 2.
Applications –
When you use Symfony 1 or 1.4, the project has certain applications, one for the front-end and another one for the back-end for instance. However, when you use Symfony 2 for the application development, you are supposed to create only one application. If you wish to create another application, you will have to create another project and share some bundles with them. And if you want to separate the front-end and the back-end features of a few bundles; you will have to create sub-namespace for the controllers, sub-directories for templates, different semantic configurations and so on.
Bundles & plug-ins –
While plug-ins in Symfony 1 consist of configuration, modules, PHP libraries, assets and anything else related to your project, in Symfony 2, the concept of plug-ins is replaced by “bundles”. Bundles are more powerful than plug-ins as the core Symfony 2 framework is brought through a series of bundles. In Symfony 1, you will have to enable plug-ins within the ProjectConfiguration class. On the other hand, bundles in Symfony 2 are activated within the application kernel itself.
Faster –
When compared with Symfony 1, Symfony seems more faster. There are many components have been improved to a certain extent for the development using this new version. Symfony 2 development gives best results when it comes to build more complicated websites.
When it comes to choosing a viable tool for website development or application, Symfony 2 is preferred by most of the developers. But the things don’t end here. There are many developers who still prefer to use Symfony 1.4 for developing web applications. What’s your take on this? Share your views in the comments…!
