This weekend I wanted to try the symfony project. They offer a “My first symfony project” tutorial together with a special download (symfony sandbox), which should contain all required libraries. Well, that is not completely true, as Pear must be installed. After installing Pear I was able to request the “congratulations page” and to do the scaffolding part of the tutorial. But the framework was slow, really slow (it took around 5-6 seconds to display these simple pages). Although they write in the readme file that the dev environment is slower than the default environment, it is a little bit too slow for me ;-)
Anyway, there was no forthcoming for me due to problems with accessing the database. Symfony could not open the SQLite database. So I tried to switch to MySQL, and changed the database configuration in config/databases.yml. But for some reason symfony still generated code for SQLite. And so I gave up ;-)
Even though I will give it another try with the default installation.