We were so proud that Yahoo! decided to use symfony for one of their services that we didn't talk a lot about other symfony powered websites lately. But there are more than 150 sites advertising their use of symfony in the wiki, probably hundreds more of Intranet and corporate Internet websites, not to mentions the ones we (Sensio) develop for our clients. It is time do a little focus on two of them, so that you all get convinced that symfony is mature, broadly used, and has great performance.

First, let's listen to Phil Fernandez, founder and CEO of Marketo. Their product, released just a few days a go, is a "Software as a Service" or SssS application designed to help marketing professionals drive more and better leads to their sales channel. They chose symfony to power the whole server-side, and here is what they say about it:

Symfony gave us an immediate head start, since we didn't need to assemble all the pieces, and it gave us a strong foundation that let us immediately begin writing application code, rather than worrying about infrastructure. My co-founders and I did the Askeet tutorial, and were off and coding.

One of the things that worked out well was the way we were able to design and build our AJAX client integrated with Symfony. Again, Symfony gave us a great starting point, and we extended that infrastructure a good bit to build a JSON data and event exchange mechanism that has served us well. We used Prototype in the early days of the project, but switched to the Yahoo! YUI and Jack Slocum's yui-ext AJAX frameworks, and they were very easy to integrate with Symfony.

One of the best parts of the project was how stable we found Symfony to be. We found few if any bugs, and it was just a rock-solid foundation for us from start to finish. And we added more developers to the project, they learned symfony quickly and the source code structure that symfony provides made it easy to add more developers to the project, each able to work independently on their own part of the product.

The next application we want to talk about is W3Counter. It is a free web tracker for your website or blog, providing detailed web stats to nearly 5,000 websites. Dan Grossman, owner of Awio Web Services LLC and the main web developer of the application, recently posted this note to the symfony mailing-list:

[W3Counters supports] over 300 database queries per second, over a billion page views being analyzed, over 28 real-time reports for each site, AJAX, RSS feeds, and lots more running on this framework. All on a single server.

Thanks Symfony for making it so painless.

Thank you both in return for your comments on symfony, and the contributions you've made to the community by helping other developers, spreading the word, and more.

If you have such a success story with your own service developed with symfony, don't hesitate to send us a note. We love that real users share their experience with the framework, it better contributes to the fame of symfony than all the promotion we could do ourselves...

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