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Play vs Symfony: What are the differences?

Play: The High Velocity Web Framework For Java and Scala. Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications; Symfony: A PHP full-stack web framework. Symfony is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP. Symfony can be used to develop all kind of websites, from your personal blog to high traffic ones like Dailymotion or Yahoo! Answers.

Play and Symfony belong to "Frameworks (Full Stack)" category of the tech stack.

"Scala", "Web-friendly architecture" and "Built on akka" are the key factors why developers consider Play; whereas "Open source", "Php" and "Community" are the primary reasons why Symfony is favored.

Play and Symfony are both open source tools. It seems that Symfony with 21.1K GitHub stars and 7.01K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Play with 11.2K GitHub stars and 3.77K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Symfony has a broader approval, being mentioned in 374 company stacks & 277 developers stacks; compared to Play, which is listed in 112 company stacks and 47 developer stacks.

Advice on Play and Symfony
Quade Claxton
Needs advice
on
DjangoDjango
and
SymfonySymfony

Hi everyone! I'm starting a personal project that I've been postponing for a little while and I need a bit of advice. I thought that it will be a bit of a challenge but I figure the best way to learn is by doing!

The plan is to build an app with loads of automation build in for reporting which would make it very easy to perform tasks, The plan is to build something similar to an HR app using microservice architecture, separating services e.g. employee data, payroll (including calculations based on easily entered info like tax %), employee services (vacation, sick day allowance booking and tabulation) and automated reporting on a pre-defined schedule (bi-weekly, monthly).

I am considering Django (as I currently know a bit of Python) and Symfony (as a friend who is a developer recommended it) but I am well aware there are other (and probably better) tools out there for the job (like maybe ExpressJS/Node.js for the backend and React/Vue.js for the front).

Background:

I have got knowledge as a DevOps, Site Reliability and Cloud engineer so once the app is built I'm very comfortable taking it to deployment.

Thank you all for your help and responses.

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Replies (1)
Ibrahim Gunduz
Software Developer at PayU · | 2 upvotes · 52.4K views
Recommends

Hi. I guess it all depends on what your goal is. If you wanna make fast prototyping Django or ExpressJNodeJS might be really good candidates. You can write your services quickly and easily by using anyone of them. Maybe we can also put Laravel in the same category.

Symfony is also another application framework that comes with many reusable components. It provides great flexibility with the configuration and dependency management solutions. So that you can inject or override anything, anytime without doing something hack-ish. You don't have to depend on any components that come with the framework and, replace them with whatever you prefer unless encounter any integration issues. I can say that Laravel also provides most of the Symfony futures as it uses its components under the hood. However, my personal experience with Laravel was not so good because it made me feel like I use a modernized version of Codeigniter. But anyway. :) So if I have to choose one of them, I would choose Symfony.

From the backend perspective, all of those have some pros and cons. For example, If strict type declaration is important for you and you don't like code magics like monkey patching etc., maybe Python and NodeJS might not be good candidates and maybe you could choose Symfony/php. However, in this case, you'll be missed out on the most powerful future of NodeJS which is non-blocking io. if you plan to do IO-intensive works, I think it would be a big loss.

So, maybe I can recommend you to have a look at typescript + NestJS also. https://nestjs.com/ The futures that NestJS provides might be a good balance between the strengths of Symfony and NodeJS.

As I'm backend dev., I haven't work too many frontend projects but from my personal experience, I loved ReactJS more than Vue although Vue was simpler. Maybe a front-end developer can give us more helpful details about those.

Hope it helps.

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Leonardo Viada
Project manager and web developer at Revo Digital · | 4 upvotes · 2.7M views
Needs advice
on
PlayPlayRailsRails
and
ScalaScala
at

In the past few months, a project we're working on grew up quite fast. Since we're adding more and more features, I'm considering migrating my Express/TS REST API towards a more solid and more "enterprise-like" framework. Since I am experienced with TypeScript but not so much with Rails nor Play (Scala), I'd like to have some advice on which one could provide the best development experience, and most importantly, the smoothest paradigm transition from the JS/TS world. I've worked on some personal project with Rails, but I've found the Ruby language really distant from what the TypeScript ecosystem and syntax are, whereas on the opposite - during the brief tours I've taken in the past weeks - it's been a pleasure coding in Scala. Obviously, there are some key differences between the two languages - and the two frameworks consequently - but despite all the ROR automation and ease of use I don't despise at all Scala's pragmatic and great features such as static typing, pattern matching, and type inference. So... Please help me out with the choice! Regards

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Replies (4)
Kevin Emery
QE Systems Engineer at Discovery, Inc. · | 6 upvotes · 59.3K views
Recommends
on
RailsRails

I don't have the Scala experience to compare the two, but I can say that Ruby is a wonderful language. For procedural programming where you don't need a lot of concurrent execution threads, it's superior to Node.JS in my opinion. All of the concepts from Typescript have equivalent syntax in Ruby, but there are fewer symbols (e.g. () => { ... }); ) and more keywords (eg 'do ... end'). It's a very flexible language and allows for a lot of different approaches to how it's written, so coding standards and careful organization is important. In the long run, however, you'll find it quicker to debug than Node.JS and just as powerful.

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ALESSIO SALTARIN
Distinguished IT Architect at IBM · | 5 upvotes · 60.2K views

If you are comfortable with TypeScript, why not evolve to a C# ecosystem? Asp.Net Core + Entity Framework is a mature and well supported technology. As far as I can see in the enterprise market, the most adopted choice is still Java. So, maybe you may have a look to SpringBoot - and ultimately Quarkus.

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Hosam Aly
Senior Software Engineer · | 3 upvotes · 51.4K views
Recommends
on
PlayPlayRailsRailsScalaScala

If software performance is your top priority, then Scala/Play is probably best. If developer productivity is your top priority, then Ruby on Rails is the best choice in my opinion.

The Rails framework is batteries-included. The framework takes care of many things by default so that you don't have to. Logging, security, etc. It's also well-integrated; for example, controllers understand models out of the box. I had a better experience with RoR than with Play.

On the other hand, Scala and the JVM are more performant in general, so they can scale to serve more requests per second on the same hardware.

If you're considering serverless functions, then Scala is probably a better choice because it would be faster to load, giving you better economics.

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Reza Malek
at Meam Software Engineering Group · | 3 upvotes · 51.4K views
Recommends
on
RailsRailsScalaScala

This is advice regardless of your background and requirements. The Play framework has a terrible and complicated design, don't risk it. I even suggest Spring and Kotlin over it! You can use Scala for small services and Data Engineering stuff and benefit optimizations and threading of JVM. RoR, on the other hand, has a huge development speed, which I believe is a big advantage cause you can handle performance bottlenecks later. Also, Scala has another downside, which is featureful in terms of OO and FP paradigms, which makes anyone write code freely with any personal style and makes it a problem in a team, Hence a coding style has to be defined if there would be Scala development team.

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Needs advice
on
GolangGolangNode.jsNode.js
and
SymfonySymfony

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.

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

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Replies (1)
Max Musing
Founder & CEO at BaseDash · | 6 upvotes · 214.1K views
Recommends
on
Node.jsNode.js
at

Go with Node.js. There's something really satisfying about being able to use a single language across your entire tech stack. Especially once you integrate GraphQL, which is effectively JSON.

Your second best option is Go, but the ecosystem around Node.js is quite a bit stronger. This will play a big factor when you start building functionality like file management, messaging (especially in real-time), and authentication. The libraries and documentation are just stronger for Node.

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Decisions about Play and Symfony
Danilo Polani
Senior Software Engineer at WeRoad · | 7 upvotes · 101.3K views

For a full-stack app or just simple APIs I'd go 100% with Laravel. You get a clean architecture, beautiful documentation and friendly and always growing community: the project is yours, from A to Z. With their docs and resources like Laracast you can start from zero and build what you want, when you want. The learning curve is definitely smaller when compared to Symfony and, with the help of a bit of "magic" (Facades etc.) you get the same results in the half of the time with cleaner code.

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Pros of Play
Pros of Symfony
  • 81
    Scala
  • 55
    Web-friendly architecture
  • 55
    Built on akka
  • 50
    Stateless
  • 47
    High-scalable
  • 46
    Fast
  • 40
    Open source
  • 34
    Java
  • 27
    High velocity
  • 24
    Fun
  • 9
    Lightweight
  • 8
    Non-blocking io
  • 6
    Developer friendly
  • 5
    Simple template engine
  • 4
    Scalability
  • 3
    Pure love
  • 2
    Resource efficient
  • 177
    Open source
  • 149
    Php
  • 130
    Community
  • 129
    Dependency injection
  • 122
    Professional
  • 80
    Doctrine
  • 75
    Organized
  • 71
    Modular architecture
  • 47
    Smart programming
  • 45
    Solid
  • 20
    Documentation
  • 16
    LTS releases
  • 10
    Decoupled framework components
  • 10
    Robust
  • 10
    Easy to Learn
  • 8
    Good practices guideline
  • 8
    Service container
  • 8
    Bundle
  • 7
    Powerful
  • 7
    Simple
  • 6
    Flexible

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Cons of Play
Cons of Symfony
  • 3
    Evolves fast, keep up with releases
  • 1
    Unnecessarily complicated
  • 10
    Too many dependency
  • 8
    Lot of config files
  • 4
    YMAL
  • 3
    Feature creep
  • 1
    Bloated

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What is Play?

Play Framework makes it easy to build web applications with Java & Scala. Play is based on a lightweight, stateless, web-friendly architecture. Built on Akka, Play provides predictable and minimal resource consumption (CPU, memory, threads) for highly-scalable applications.

What is Symfony?

It is written with speed and flexibility in mind. It allows developers to build better and easy to maintain websites with PHP..

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What companies use Play?
What companies use Symfony?
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What tools integrate with Play?
What tools integrate with Symfony?

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What are some alternatives to Play and Symfony?
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.
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
Python
Python is a general purpose programming language created by Guido Van Rossum. Python is most praised for its elegant syntax and readable code, if you are just beginning your programming career python suits you best.
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.
See all alternatives