API Platform vs Symfony

Overview

Symfony

Stacks8.5K

Followers6.2K

Votes1.1K

GitHub Stars30.7K

Forks9.7K

API Platform

Stacks85

Followers128

Votes8

API Platform vs Symfony: What are the differences?

API Platform is a powerful set of tools built on top of Symfony, a popular PHP framework. While Symfony provides a foundation for building web applications, API Platform focuses specifically on creating and managing APIs. This means that API Platform offers additional features and functionality specifically designed for API development.

Architecture: One key difference between API Platform and Symfony is the architecture they follow. Symfony uses a traditional MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, where the application is divided into separate layers responsible for handling various aspects of the application. On the other hand, API Platform follows a CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) and DDD (Domain-Driven Design) architecture. This allows for better separation of concerns and enables the use of specific patterns and concepts specifically tailored for building APIs.
Automatic CRUD operations: API Platform simplifies the process of creating CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations by automatically generating them based on the provided entity definitions. With Symfony, you would need to manually define and implement these operations for each entity.
API documentation: API Platform provides built-in tools for automatically generating API documentation, including interactive API documentation using the OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger) specification. This makes it easier for developers to understand and consume the API without the need for extensive manual documentation. Symfony, on the other hand, does not have built-in support for generating API documentation.
Serialization and normalization: API Platform offers a powerful serialization and normalization system that allows developers to define how entities should be serialized and normalized when exposed through the API. This ensures consistency and flexibility when dealing with data representations. Symfony also has serialization capabilities, but they are not as comprehensive and integrated as in API Platform.
GraphQL support: API Platform provides out-of-the-box support for GraphQL, a query language for APIs. This allows developers to easily expose GraphQL endpoints and benefit from the advantages of this query language, such as reducing over-fetching and under-fetching of data. Symfony does not have native support for GraphQL and would require additional configuration and libraries to implement it.

In Summary, API Platform and Symfony have key differences in their architecture, automatic CRUD operations, API documentation generation, serialization and normalization capabilities, and native support for GraphQL. API Platform focuses specifically on creating and managing APIs, providing additional features and functionality tailored for API development.

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Advice on Symfony, API Platform

Fabian

May 5, 2020

Needs adviceon

GraphQL

C++

Symfony

I'm about to begin working on an API, for which I plan to add GraphQL connectivity for processing data. The data processed will mainly be audio files being downloaded/uploaded with some user messaging & authentication.

I don't mind the difficulty in any service since I've used C++ (for data structures & algorithms at least) and would also say I am patient and can learn fairly quickly. My main concerns would be their performance, libraries/community, and job marketability.

Why I'm stuck between these three...

Symfony: I've programmed in PHP for back-end in a previous internship and may do so again in a few months.

Node.js: It's newer than PHP, and it's JavaScript where my front-end stack will be React and (likely) React Native.

Golang: It's newer than PHP, I've heard of its good performance, and it would be nice to learn a new (growing) language.

2.4M views2.4M

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Symfony	API Platform
It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..	It is a set of tools to build and consume web APIs. You can build a fully-featured hypermedia or GraphQL API in minutes. Leverage its awesome features to develop complex and high performance API-first projects. Extend or override everything you want.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 30.7K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 9.7K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 8.5K	Stacks 85
Followers 6.2K	Followers 128
Votes 1.1K	Votes 8
Pros & Cons
Pros 177 Open source 149 Php 130 Community 129 Dependency injection 122 Professional Cons 10 Too many dependency 8 Lot of config files 4 YMAL 3 Feature creep 1 Bloated	Pros 1 Restful 1 Automated api-docs 1 Easy to use 1 Composer 1 Open source Cons 2 Easy only for easy task like normal crud on entity
Integrations
CakePHP PHP ReactPHP	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Symfony, API Platform?

Node.js

Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

Rails

Rails is a web-application framework that includes everything needed to create database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern.

Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Laravel

It is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax. It attempts to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks used in the majority of web projects, such as authentication, routing, sessions, and caching.

.NET

.NET is a general purpose development platform. With .NET, you can use multiple languages, editors, and libraries to build native applications for web, mobile, desktop, gaming, and IoT for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and more.

ASP.NET Core

A free and open-source web framework, and higher performance than ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft and the community. It is a modular framework that runs on both the full .NET Framework, on Windows, and the cross-platform .NET Core.

Spring

A key element of Spring is infrastructural support at the application level: Spring focuses on the "plumbing" of enterprise applications so that teams can focus on application-level business logic, without unnecessary ties to specific deployment environments.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot makes it easy to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can "just run". We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss. Most Spring Boot applications need very little Spring configuration.

Android SDK

Android provides a rich application framework that allows you to build innovative apps and games for mobile devices in a Java language environment.

Phoenix Framework

Phoenix is a framework for building HTML5 apps, API backends and distributed systems. Written in Elixir, you get beautiful syntax, productive tooling and a fast runtime.

Related Comparisons

API Platform vs Symfony: What are the differences?

Architecture: One key difference between API Platform and Symfony is the architecture they follow. Symfony uses a traditional MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, where the application is divided into separate layers responsible for handling various aspects of the application. On the other hand, API Platform follows a CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) and DDD (Domain-Driven Design) architecture. This allows for better separation of concerns and enables the use of specific patterns and concepts specifically tailored for building APIs.
Automatic CRUD operations: API Platform simplifies the process of creating CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations by automatically generating them based on the provided entity definitions. With Symfony, you would need to manually define and implement these operations for each entity.
API documentation: API Platform provides built-in tools for automatically generating API documentation, including interactive API documentation using the OpenAPI (formerly known as Swagger) specification. This makes it easier for developers to understand and consume the API without the need for extensive manual documentation. Symfony, on the other hand, does not have built-in support for generating API documentation.
Serialization and normalization: API Platform offers a powerful serialization and normalization system that allows developers to define how entities should be serialized and normalized when exposed through the API. This ensures consistency and flexibility when dealing with data representations. Symfony also has serialization capabilities, but they are not as comprehensive and integrated as in API Platform.
GraphQL support: API Platform provides out-of-the-box support for GraphQL, a query language for APIs. This allows developers to easily expose GraphQL endpoints and benefit from the advantages of this query language, such as reducing over-fetching and under-fetching of data. Symfony does not have native support for GraphQL and would require additional configuration and libraries to implement it.

API Platform vs Symfony

Overview