Unlock the potential of Symfony for Drupal developers. Learn why this powerful framework is the perfect match, enhancing your Drupal development skills and opening up new possibilities.
PHP is, without a doubt, one of the most valuable programming languages for web development. Web engineers have been using it for some time and its popularity has increased to the point that 79% of websites use it . It's not surprising to know that PHP has a vast community and countless resources to make web development much more accessible.
This is especially true for our Drupal development services team, who consider Symfony to be the perfect ally for Drupal. Why? Well, Drupal uses Symfony components in its core library. This means that understanding how Symfony works allows you to look under the “hood” of Drupal. Here are some things to keep in mind.
But first – what is Symfony?
The official Symfony website defines it as follows:
“Symfony is a set of PHP components, a web application framework, a philosophy, and a community – all working together in harmony.”
It's important, then, to understand each of its elements to truly understand what Symfony can bring to the table – especially for Drupal developers. So, let's break down these elements:
Web Application Framework
A reusable software environment that offers specific functionality to create websites and web applications more easily. This framework is built with Symfony components.
Components
The elements that make up the framework and that are used to build PHP applications. Drupal uses some of these components at its core.
Philosophy
Symfony's creators emphasize the importance of adopting best practices, leading to greater professionalism, standardization, and highly interoperable applications.
Community
Just like PHP, Symfony is widely adopted on a global scale, making it a great alternative for web development, as there are countless forums and resources to promote any Symfony project.
Benefits of Symfony
Symfony's definition should already give you an idea of its benefits. But they're worth reviewing, as it helps you understand why learning Symfony is a good career path for engineers working on Drupal development.
Flexibility
Components and packages provide Symfony with a high degree of flexibility. On the one hand, the components allow you to reduce the number of routine tasks you need to perform. On the other hand, the plugin-like nature of packages allows you to reuse them across multiple applications and projects. The combination of both elements allows you to combine them as needed with guaranteed performance and stability.
Reliability
Symfony has proven itself time and time again – and its longevity is a testament to that reliability. Developers keep turning to it because of its stability and flexibility. Its reliability is so high that some frameworks have started using it as a base, including Drupal.
Test
Since Symfony relies on packages and components, you can be sure that they have all been thoroughly tested. This is supported by broad community support and the Symfony philosophy that promotes good practices when writing code.
Documentation
You may not see documentation as a big advantage, but it really is. The Symfony documentation is proof that proper documentation can take you far, as you can use it to find detailed explanations of every component and the entire development process.
Why Symfony and Drupal
There are many benefits to learning Symfony for Drupal developers. Firstly, it allows them to take a look at Drupal itself, as the web content management framework uses Symfony components like EventDispatcher, HttpFoundation, Routing, Validator, and Yaml. Knowing how to deal with them can bring several advantages to any PHP project. Like this? Because you can supercharge your projects by adding new components on demand (something you can do through composer and autoload).
By reusing Symfony components and packages, you are building your Drupal project based on highly tested code that was written following strict guidelines and standards. This means you won't have to waste time and effort writing and testing new code for your project to take advantage of many features – it will be available to you through these Symfony elements.
What's more, learning about Symfony leads you to learn about best practices and standards, which ultimately increases the quality of your products. This is because you will end up absorbing the Symfony philosophy and learn how to write good code by reusing code that has been thoroughly tested and endorsed by a vast community of developers. In some ways, using Symfony in combination with Drupal can lead you to cleaner, easier to maintain solutions with higher performance.
Source: BairesDev
