In his latest post Benjamin Eberlei talks about some of his reasoning to want to Symfony all the things when it comes to building web applications. Actually, it's the results of a discussion he had with a coworker about when is the right point to move from a micro-services infrastructure to a full-stack framework like Symfony.

We use microservice architectures for the bepado and PHP Profiler projects that Qafoo is working on at the monent. For the different components a mix of Symfony Framework, Silex, Symfony Components and our own Rest-Microframework (RMF) are used. This zoo of different solutions sparked a recent discussion with my colleague Manuel about when we would want to use Symfony for a web application.

He talks about some of his own reasons for making the choice including things like the HttpKernel and having a well documented and standardized solution. He notes that most of his reasons are more because of his previous exposure to the framework and could be very similar for others and other frameworks, though. He then extends on the "Hello World" code from the previous post and makes an improved minimal Symfony app with just seven basic parts (including configuration files).

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.

Rob Allen, in his Zend Framework 2 development, has come up with a list of suggestions about the use of modules in your applications, mainly relating to the structure of the files inside of them.

I've been working on a Zend Framework 2 module within a larger project that doesn't have that many PHP class files. Specifically, it has a controller, a mapper, an entity, a service and a form. As a result, the traditional Zend Framework 2 directory structure for the Account module looks [overly complicated]. That's a lot of directories for not many files! As a result, I decided to flatten it to [something simpler].

He includes both the "before" and "after" directory structures and continues on with two more suggestions - the removal of the top level "Account" folder inside of "src/" and, finally, removing "src/" all together with a slight modification to the autoloading. With a simpler module, though, something like this might make it easier to maintain and "follow" later down the road.

On PHPKitchen, there's a new note about the release of the latest stable version of the popular Seagull Framework, version 0.6.0.

After 3 release candidates stable version 0.6.0 of the Seagull framework was released last week, download it here. Blame it on the heat wave this summer in the UK, we broke our "1 release per month" mantra for the first time in 3 years, but I think the results were worth waiting for.

There's information included about how to install (minimal and developer versions) as well as some of the improvements made, including:

• automated module installation for admin users, and improvements to the module generator wizard
• mproved wizard functionality based on PEAR's HTML_QuickForm_Controller (Malaney J. Hill)
• nice CAPTCHA component (Steven Stremciuc)

You can get complete information on the framework on its site and grab the download here.

On PHPKitchen, there's a new note about the release of the latest stable version of the popular Seagull Framework, version 0.6.0.

After 3 release candidates stable version 0.6.0 of the Seagull framework was released last week, download it here. Blame it on the heat wave this summer in the UK, we broke our "1 release per month" mantra for the first time in 3 years, but I think the results were worth waiting for.

There's information included about how to install (minimal and developer versions) as well as some of the improvements made, including:

• automated module installation for admin users, and improvements to the module generator wizard
• mproved wizard functionality based on PEAR's HTML_QuickForm_Controller (Malaney J. Hill)
• nice CAPTCHA component (Steven Stremciuc)

You can get complete information on the framework on its site and grab the download here.