Project - A Lightweight Symfony-Based Micro Framework

Overview

Boot Framework started as a personal project while working at Retail Solutions. Background processes were written as plain PHP scripts, which was unmaintainable. Symfony 2 was the obvious choice, but it was too complex and heavy to get the team on board with. I built a micro framework that cherry-picked the most valuable Symfony components — CLI and Dependency Injection — while keeping everything else minimal.

The Problem at Beslist.nl

Later, at Beslist.nl, the same problem resurfaced in a different form. The Search Team wanted to use Symfony's CLI component and Dependency Injection container, but these weren't supported by Silex (the micro framework of the time). More critically, the APIs handled ~1.5 million requests per day with a hard ceiling of 100ms average response time. Full Symfony was simply too heavy for this workload.

Boot Framework solved this by providing:

• Symfony Console commands for CLI tooling and background jobs.
• Symfony Dependency Injection for clean, testable service wiring.
• Minimal bootstrap overhead — no routing layer, no HTTP kernel, no template engine. Just the components you need.

Design Principles

• Cherry-pick, don't bundle — Only include Symfony components that are explicitly needed. No framework tax.
• Zero-config where possible — Convention over configuration to keep setup minimal.
• Production-proven — Used in systems handling millions of requests per day at sub-100ms latency.