[eropple]

Quickly:

-CakePHP is atrociously slow, even when running with APC, and uses an alarming amount of memory for what you get. Symfony2 is neither slow nor particularly memory-hungry.

-CakePHP is inexpressive; it's very difficult to use it piecemeal. You either use the whole whomp of it or you don't use it at all. Symfony2 is modular and easily used for exactly what you need.

-CakePHP is stuck in the past; any framework that is intentionally made compatible with versions earlier than PHP 5.3 is short-changing its users by not taking advantage of exactly what the language is capable of doing.

It has no real redeeming features. (Note that I wouldn't recommend PHP in any greenfield development today, but if you have to do it, Symfony2, or at least the Silex core, are no-brainers.)

[Arcanum-XIII]

"Note that I wouldn't recommend PHP in any greenfield development today"

I'm curious, but what would you recommend ? I'm not cynic — but I work in a very small startup, doing mainly maintenance code in php and I've suffered my share of "use Drupal for x" when x is inappropriate inside Drupal, or any cms, and would have asked for a mostly custom backend designed from the ground up. So for these case I'm stuck — trying to do my best within the constrain I have. But for the occasion where I can do better, I'm curious about alternative !

[eropple]

I generally use Java and Scala for my own personal projects. Scala less than I'd like because there's no really good solution for web development aside from Lift (and Lift, while comprised of fantastic code, doesn't map well to my mental model of web development), but moving more and more towards it over time.

Some Python too, but that's more for one-offs.