posted by Dustin Whittle on 2008-05-08 at 07:59

Yahoo! used symfony to redevelop another project. This time symfony was used as part of the foundation for Yahoo! Answers. Yahoo! Answers is the largest collection of human knowledge on the Web with more than 135 million users and 515 million answers worldwide. Yahoo! Answers is the 2nd ranked education & reference site on the web and is available in 26 markets and 12 languages.

Why did Yahoo! choose symfony for another large web application project?

Philosophy

• Full-stack framework for building complex web applications
• Adopt best ideas from anywhere, using existing code if available (Mojavi, Prado, Rails, Django)
  

Design

• Clean separation between Model, View, and Controller
• Controller using modules and actions
• Views using templates in straight PHP with helpers
• Easy to reuse view modules to compose a page (Layouts, Components, Partials, Slots)
  

Configurability / Flexibility

• Features we do not want are easily disabled
• Use of factories for easy customization
  

Documentation / Support Community

• The Definitive Guide to symfony (free online)
• Excellent tutorials and example applications - Askeet
• Active community with wiki, mailing lists, forums, irc channel
  
  

Once again symfony fits the requirements of an enterprise web application. Dustin Whittle of Yahoo! presented a case study on redeveloping Y! Answers. The focus was how to work with open source tools to create a complete framework (PHP, JS, CSS) for the enterprise. He used his experience redeveloping Yahoo! Answers with symfony and Yahoo! User Interface libraries as a case study. Download the presentation from slideshare.

 

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Add a Comment

#1 tsb said about 7 hours later

Whoa, nice! Congratulations! :)

#2 tsb said about 7 hours later

By the way, would be interesting to know what they used and didn't use. I'm guessing the model is still custom?

#3 Rob said about 5 hours later

I wonder why they went with the weird URLs:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ArdgGze7i8O0kLqAyNbm1Cnpy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20080507180734AABxNPn

Semicolons and then the question mark at the end only for the qid.

#4 [MA]Pascal said about 3 hours later

Really nice, ysfR3Plugin looks rly promising :p

#5 Brad said about 6 hours later

The weird URLs are for internal tracking.

And I can confirm that the model is somewhat customised.

#6 test said about 23 hours later

wow! good~

#7 vinilios said 1 day later

Great news for symfony....

now its time for yahoo to support the community with their precious plugins :)

#8 Christopher Brunsdon said 1 day later

Awesome. Projects like this give Symfony the exposure it needs.

#9 paolovas said 1 day later

Great news !

#10 Mohammad said 1 day later

WwWwowWwW

#11 mozey said 3 days later

congratulations :)