Yahoo! Answers powered by symfony

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.