Developing a new web application should not mean reinventing the wheel. Thats why a framework is an essential item in your development toolbox. It helps you respect coding standards; write bulletproof, maintainable code; and focus on business rules rather than waste time on repetitive tasks. This book introduces you to symfony, the leading framework for PHP developers, showing you how to wield its many features to develop web applications faster and more efficiently, even if you only know a bit of PHP. In The Definitive Guide to symfony, you will learn about the Model-View-Controller architecture and the crucial role it plays in making frameworks like symfony possible. The book also covers framework installation and configuration, and shows you how to build pages, deal with templates, manage requests and sessions, and communicate with databases and servers. You will see how symfony can make your life easier by effectively managing form data, enhancing the user experience with Ajax, internationalizing applications for a global audience, and using smart URLs. Authors François Zaninotto and Fabien Potencier put a strong emphasis on the tools that symfony provides for professional environments, showing you how to take advantage of unit tests, scaffolding, plug-ins, the command line, and extensible configuration. And since frameworks often raise performance-related debate, this book will give you many tips and techniques for monitoring and improving your applications performance, from caching to expert configuration tweaks. Always keen to offer practical instruction, the authors include lots of code examples, expert tips, best practices, and illustrations throughout this book, with the goal of providing a resource that satisfies the educational needs of symfony's rapidly growing user community.