Srinivasan A Paul Joseph

Yii PHP Framework

October 26, 2009 PHP, PHP, Reviews

Yii PHP Framework was a pleasant surprise for me when I initially found about it. For quite some time, I’ve been intrigued by Ruby on Rails for it’s ease of use and rapid development nature. Though I’m not a big fan of Ruby language or Python for that matter, I’m of course a huge fan of PHP.

So, I’ve been on the lookout for a good Framework in PHP that I can rely on for whenever I need to build a website rapidly. I’ve so far tried the following frameworks:

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Zend

To find more, please visit: PHP Frameworks.

When I was browsing PHP Frameworks site months ago, I came across a framework named Yii that promised that it was the fastest PHP framework. I’ve got intrigued and checked out its features and quite surprised to find that it has excellent features while being high performing and less resource hungry. The following are some of it’s key features:

• Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern: Yii adopts this proven technique in Web programming which can better separate logic from presentation.
• Database Access Objects (DAO) and Active Record: Yii allows developers to model database data in terms of objects and save their effort of writing long and repetitive SQL statements.
• Integration with jQuery: as one of the most popular JavaScript framework, jQuery enables writing highly efficient and versatile JavaScript interfaces.
• Form input and validation: Yii makes collecting form input extremely easy and safe. Yii comes with a set of validators which can be used to ensure validity of input data, and it also has helper methods and widgets to indicate errors when validation fails.
• Web 2.0 widgets: powered by jQuery, Yii comes with a set of Web 2.0 widgets, such as auto-complete input field, treeview, and so on.
• Authentication and authorization: Yii has built-in authentication support. It also supports authorization via hierarchical role-based access control (RBAC).
• Theming: it enables change of the outlook of an Yii application instantly.
• Web services: Yii supports automatic generation of complex WSDL service specifications and management of Web service request handling.
• Internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N): Yii supports message translation, date and time formatting, number formatting, and interface localization.
• Layered caching scheme: Yii supports data caching, page caching, fragment caching and dynamic content. The storage medium of caching can be changed easily without touching the application code.
• Error handling and logging: errors are handled and presented more nicely, and log messages can be categorized, filtered and routed to different destinations.
• Security: Yii is equipped with many security measures to help secure Web applications to prevent cyber attacks. These measures include cross-site scripting (XSS) prevention, cross-site request forgery (CSRF) prevention, cookie tampering prevention, etc.
• Compliance to XHTML: Code generated by Yii components and command line tools complies to the XHTML standard.
• Automatic code generation: Yii provides the tools that can automatically generate the code that you need, such as a skeleton application, CRUD applications, etc.
• Purely object-oriented: Yii framework sticks to strict OOP paradigm. It does not define any global function or variable. And the class hierarchy that it defines allows maximum reusability and customization.
• Friendly with third-party code: Yii is carefully designed to work well with third-party code. For example, you can use code from PEAR or Zend Framework in your Yii application.
• Detailed documentation: every single method or property is clearly documented. A comprehensive tutorial is also provided together with other minor tutorials.
• Extension library: Yii provides an extension library consisting of user-contributed components. This makes the above feature list never ending.

Go ahead and check it out now…

Tags: Frameworks, PHP, Programming, Reviews, Yii