Comment by porker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by porker | Hacker News Reader

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What kind of apps or websites were you developing sheraz? I'd like something less complex than Symfony, but Laravel doesn't seem as feature-complete for complex applications. Form definitions seem much more lightweight (I build 9+ page loan application forms, multi-page legal forms with repeating regions, add-remove rows etc), APIs and REST interfaces - the works. I want to change framework, but I get the impression most of the others have a smaller-project sweet spot.

[And yes, I know large stuff can be built with the others, like it can with Drupal. But does the framework make it as/more easy than Symfony, that's the question?]

A free rant :): I hate the Doctrine ORM for it's hideously bad documentation (either missing information or written by core devs for core devs -- I can't contribute to improving it as I don't understand it well enough!) yet I appreciate a 'real' ORM vs an ActiveRecord+QueryBuilder system. Gah.

I've built a few digital asset management apps for fortune 500 companies, CRUD apps for non-profits, and several different startup ideas (sites, mobile, etc).

Nothing I've made has required a lot of input form complexity, which seems to be Symfony's strong suit.

I think you might be right about the project sweet-spots. Symfony certainly seems equipped to handle workloads you describe -- I've not seen form input validation as complex as Symfony.

Is Silex too heavy or too light for your usage?

Silex is definitely a good lightweight alternative. For enterprise work Symfony 2 is a better choice, but if you need to throw things together (but need to keep the option of adding more features without writing them yourself) you can easily integrate a bunch of the Symfony 2 components into Silex.

I wouldn't call Silex "lightweight". Slim, however, is very lightweight and a pleasure to use: http://slimframework.com/

I think too light, but I don't think I've ever got the concept straight in my head. I thought it was a mapper from a URL parameter to a function - the first two code examples in http://web.archive.org/web/20130402141837/http://edorian.pos... are what I understood it to be.

TL;DR: I think Silex has changed a lot since I looked at it. I can't give you a good answer.

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