Wow, I just finished reading The definitive Guide to Symfony, and it is definitely one of the better web development books I have read.  They review everything you would need to build about 95% of web development applications.  They review the model, view control concepts, the data access and ORM provided through Propel, the ajax use though Prototype and even security and caching features.  One of the problems I have with the ASP .NET MVC framework is based on the current tutorials, documentation, and maturity of the project it’s very hard to solve what are still very common web development issues.  Every time I was reading and said to myself, “Sure that’s cool and convenient but what if you had a complex scenario like …” then the next page they would hit a more complex scenario.  Excellent.

The system is very convention driven, and I imagine it would take about 80 hours of development before you are rolling and not having to look at documentation or a book every minute.  But, everything makes good sense.  The separation of concern in the framework is impressive and everything is configured in YAML setting files.  Things like validation, connection strings, your database schema, routing, errors are all configured via these files.

Many ORMs go from either the database to generate the data access tier or they go from a set of classes you build to generate the database schema.  With Symfony, Propel & YAML configuration you can go either way you want.  Pretty cool.

AJAX support for 90% of what you would need to do on a daily basis is provided via helpers and abstracted away from you somewhat by Symfony AJAX helpers.

Form generation, validation and saving of data is outlined very well in the book.  Examples are shown for many different scenarios so you should be able to create majority of your applications screens by only using this book as a reference.

Setting it up and getting started doesn’t look terribly easy, I’m yet to write “Hello World.”  Maybe next week I will get it all setup and do some coding.  Setting it up in a production environment where your applications all share a single core Symfony install looked a bit odd.  Might need some online documentation help for that.  But overall thumbs up on the framework and the book.