Amine Matmati has written up a post with a few quick points refuting the "bloated framwork" myth as it relates to the Symfony framework.

At work, we’re trying to choose which PHP framework to use for our next project. As we’re breaking up our monolithic app into services, only micro frameworks were considered by the team. This choice was made to avoid the pain points we’ve encountered using our current full stack framework.

Not all full stack frameworks are created equal, however. Having worked with Symfony before, I proposed it as an option. As expected, I’ve had some pushback from my fellow coworkers. The main reason being that Symfony is bloated and overkill for our needs.

He then goes on to talk about how, despite many Symfony components being used individually by other projects, the overall framework still has the reputation for bloat. He goes through some of the main points usually mentioned by the opponents:

• Doctrine is complex/bad/slow
• Symfony is too verbose
• Symfony uses too much configuration

He does agree with some of the points made but usually not in the general way they've been stated. For example, while he does agree that Symfony is verbose he also points out that this verbosity provides more control to the developer as to exactly how things hook together.

Igor Wiedler has shared some of his thoughts on his site today about the "heaviness" of things that call themselves "microframeworks" and why it may not be about the amount of code involved at all.

Quite often silex has been described as heavy or bloated. It's time to put this myth to rest. [...] Micro-framework What an excellent buzzword! Let's face it, this is an overloaded and mostly nebulous term. I don't think it's possible to clearly define what it means. [...] But the real answer lies in what silex doesn't do.

He suggests that the "micro" in "microframework" is more about it providing a limited amount of features (bare-bones) versus a more full-featured, possibly full stack framework. He talks about the dependencies that Silex currently has and provides some statistics about it and these packages it depends on. He also briefly mentions the minimal interface the framework provides, citing the few components you'll probably touch in your work with it.

As mentioned in this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a forum posting over on the YoungCoders.com website that looks to dispell the "age old" myth about Smarty - it's suposed bloated nature.

There has been a lot of talk about how Smarty, a popular template engine for PHP, is bloated and not useful because PHP is already a templating engine and that you're essentially creating a template engine out of a template engine. As everything I read could just say that it was bloated without backing up their statement, I decided to investigate it myself.

He describes what Smarty is and how to can help you and your site with compiled templates. There's a brief look at the syntax it uses and how it can help make the output of the site simpler than invoking PHP each time. He also gets a bit more indepth on the templating system, showing the process it uses to check the template and update if it needs to.

His conclusion? Smarty isn't that much different than any other kind of simple PHP-based templating language out there. So, what about the slowness? Well, he recommends checking your compiling setting - that's where the overhead is when the pages are loading.

As mentioned in this new post on the Zend Developer Zone, there's a forum posting over on the YoungCoders.com website that looks to dispell the "age old" myth about Smarty - it's suposed bloated nature.

There has been a lot of talk about how Smarty, a popular template engine for PHP, is bloated and not useful because PHP is already a templating engine and that you're essentially creating a template engine out of a template engine. As everything I read could just say that it was bloated without backing up their statement, I decided to investigate it myself.

He describes what Smarty is and how to can help you and your site with compiled templates. There's a brief look at the syntax it uses and how it can help make the output of the site simpler than invoking PHP each time. He also gets a bit more indepth on the templating system, showing the process it uses to check the template and update if it needs to.

His conclusion? Smarty isn't that much different than any other kind of simple PHP-based templating language out there. So, what about the slowness? Well, he recommends checking your compiling setting - that's where the overhead is when the pages are loading.