Symfony 4—What’s New?

Symfony 4 showed up with the intention to change the way apps are developed. And from the developer’s perspective, lots of the new features indeed make a difference when building web apps in Symfony 4.

Major changes are: different directory structure, task automation, and completely changed installation process, just to name a few. Every new feature released is extensively written about on the framework’s official blog.

But even though Symfony 4 mainly aims to improve the developer experience, that improvement directly translates into better, faster, and bugless web apps.

Cut Down on Development Time with Automation

Symfony 4 can be integrated with Symfony Flex, which is a composer plugin managing all Symfony apps and bundles. Symfony Flex automates everything that previously had to be manually configured by a developer, i.e., declaring paths, enabling bundles, to name a few of the more tedious and most common app development tasks.

Automation in those areas means developers can work faster in Symfony 4, without having to do the initial configuration of components and bundles manually.

When devs can work faster, it takes them less time to develop the code.

Get Performance by Default

In the past releases of Symfony, performance was often a problematic issue. Real-time web apps built in Symfony lagged with an influx of active users and data transmission. With Symfony 4, this is no longer an issue.

Symfony 4 is a microframework, 70% slimmer than its 3.x releases. Because Symfony is so small and all the bundles with various app functionalities and integrations are optional, the increase in speed is significant.

When Symfony 4 came out, I did a test to see how this change really affected performance. The results I got were more than promising. After a quick upgrade of a really small application to Symfony 4, I’ve noticed 50% lower memory consumption and 30% faster execution time.

When it comes to adding features, there are numerous official components and third-party bundles available for Symfony 4. So you can add more features as the website grows and as per your needs. This ensures the web app’s source code is cleaner, open to modifications depending on the business growth rate.

Use Components to Save Time

Symfony is lauded as being one of the richest PHP frameworks in terms of reusable components it offers.

The components available in Symfony 4 help devs save even more time during web app development. With a repository of common features that can be easily implemented via components, lots of the groundwork in web app development is taken care of.

This approach allows developers to spend their time more effectively, developing and expanding business-specific functionalities.

Symfony 4: The Good Stuff

Automation—less development time, faster deployment

Performance—with eliminated files from the core version Symfony 4-powered apps show a significant increase in speed

Seamless Scalability—web apps can be upgraded and expanded easily, retaining their performance

Symfony 4 Goes After Results

Symfony 4 brings more of the good for everyone. Thanks to numerous dev-dedicated improvements, the developer experience with Symfony 4 is tremendous. That positive experience combined with new solutions introduced in the framework translate into stable and functional websites based on Symfony 4.

If your website was built with Symfony 3.4 or lower and you’re interested in an upgrade, don’t hesitate to give us a call. We’ll be happy to help you out.