Symfony is a free and open-source PHP web application framework and a set of reusable PHP component libraries. It was published as free software on October 18, 2005, and released under the MIT license. Goal Symfony aims to speed up the creation and maintenance of web applications and to replace repetitive coding tasks. It's also aimed at building robust applications in an enterprise context, and aims to give developers full control over the configuration: from the directory structure to the foreign libraries, almost everything can be customized. To match enterprise development guidelines, Symfony is bundled with additional tools to help developers test, debug and document projects. Symfony has a low performance overhead used with a bytecode cache. Technical Symfony was heavily inspired by the Spring Framework. It makes heavy use of existing PHP open-source projects as part of the framework, including: Propel or Doctrine as object-relational mapping layers PDO database abstraction layer (1.1, with Doctrine and Propel 1.3) PHPUnit, a unit testing framework Twig, a templating engine Swift Mailer, an e-mail library Symfony also makes use of its own components, which are freely available on the Symfony Components site for various other projects: Symfony YAML, a YAML parser based upon Spyc Symfony Event Dispatcher Symfony Dependency Injector, a dependency injector Symfony Templating, a templating engine Sponsors Symfony is sponsored by SensioLabs, a French software developer and professional services provider. The first name was Sensio Framework, and all classes were therefore prefixed with sf. Later on when it was decided to launch it as open-source framework, the brainstorming resulted in the name symfony (being renamed to Symfony from version 2 and on), which matches the existing theme and class name prefixes. Real-world usage Symfony is used by the open-source Q&A service Askeet and many more applications, including Delicious website. At one time it was used for 20 million users of Yahoo! Bookmarks. As of February 2009, Dailymotion.com has ported part of its code to use Symfony, and is continuing the transition. Symfony is used by OpenSky, a social shopping platform, and the Symfony framework is also used by the massively multiplayer online browser game eRepublik, and by the content management framework eZ Publish in version 5. Drupal 8, phpBB and a number of other large applications have incorporated components of Symfony. Symfony is also used by Meetic, one of the largest online dating platforms in the world, on most of its