Symfony is a written framework in PHP following the MVC (model-view-controller) model. Symfony is a framework for PHP web applications. It is written in PHP and is distributed free under MIT license.
This framework is open source, originally released more than fifteen years ago (October 2005), and has become one of the most popular PHP frameworks due to multiple features and proper documentation. In the PHP world, the Symfony framework is one of the most popular and used frameworks. These characteristics are accomplished because it has a large and strong community behind it, it has consistent and comprehensive documentation, can be taught relatively quickly thanks to the quality resources available on the Internet, offers a certification system and an increasing number of users. Symfony has been inspired from other web frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django and Spring, and is geared towards enterprise application development.
Effective work on this framework began about 15 years ago in Paris in the winter of 2004, and the launch of the first version took place in October 2005. The creator and founder of this framework is Fabien Potencier, who developed the project for his company Sensio, a French software company founded in 1998. Thanks to this, the framework was named Sensio Framework. The purpose of the framework was to enable the faster deployment of web applications intuitively and securely. After successfully applying this framework to internal projects, Fabien decided to allow the framework to be used by others to gather feedback from the users of the framework. With the launch of the open-source project, it was named Symfony (later renamed Symfony starting with version 2), a name that retained the theme and class prefix. The Symfony 1.0 version was released in early 2007 (the minimum required PHP version 5.0). It was the first stable version released, and support for it was three years. Passing from version 1.x to version 2.x was a huge step. Version 1.x was very different from version 2. It was more a revolution than a framework evolution.
The company that was behind Symfony, SensioLabs, made an inspired move and decided to rewrite the whole frame from scratch.
Versions 2.1, launched in September 2012 (the minimum required PHP version 5.3.3), and 2.2, launched in March 2013 (the minimum required PHP version 5.3.3), were similar to what we are using now but still require a lot of effort great to be able to migrate to a later version.
Symphony 2.8 = Symfony 3.0 + compatibility with previous versions
Important events:
1. Using PHP versions 5.3. was a major impact due to the introduction of namespaces, closures, anonymous functions, static binding, SPL2 enhancement, and more.
2. Due to the use of namespace, some drastic changes were needed in renaming classes. This is what has been said by the prefix Sf.
3. The PEAR installer was changed with Pyrus, a modern and robust installer.
4. Doctrine used as ORM.
5. Use git as a versioning system.
6. Use composer to install dependencies.
The new version release system offers predictability when the versions will be released, but not what will be released in each release. In the last issue, the community will have the greatest influence. If there are new functionalities that want to be introduced into the framework and there will be enough people to deal with them, we will surely see them in the following versions.