Yahoo! Answers powered by symfony

May 8, 2008 • Published by Avatar of Dustin Whittle Dustin Whittle

Yahoo! AnswersYahoo! 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.

 

Published in #Case studies

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Comments

Avatar of tsb
tsb said on May 8, 2008
Whoa, nice! Congratulations! :)
Avatar of tsb
tsb said on May 8, 2008
By the way, would be interesting to know what they used and didn't use. I'm guessing the model is still custom?
Avatar of Rob
Rob said on May 8, 2008
I wonder why they went with the weird URLs:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ArdgGze7i8O0kLqAyNbm1Cnpy6IX;_ylv=3?qid=20080507180734AABxNPn

Semicolons and then the question mark at the end only for the qid.
Avatar of [MA]Pascal
[MA]Pascal said on May 8, 2008
Really nice, ysfR3Plugin looks rly promising :p
Avatar of Brad
Brad said on May 8, 2008
The weird URLs are for internal tracking.

And I can confirm that the model is somewhat customised.
Avatar of test
test said on May 9, 2008
wow! good~
Avatar of vinilios
vinilios said on May 9, 2008
Great news for symfony....

now its time for yahoo to support the community with their precious plugins :)
Avatar of Christopher Brunsdon
Christopher Brunsdon said on May 9, 2008
Awesome. Projects like this give Symfony the exposure it needs.
Avatar of paolovas
paolovas said on May 9, 2008
Great news !
Avatar of Mohammad
Mohammad said on May 10, 2008
WwWwowWwW
Avatar of mozey
mozey said on May 11, 2008
congratulations :)
Avatar of raja islam
raja islam said on May 28, 2008
Impressive.

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