Why is Yii framework getting more and more popular?

A lot of experienced PHP programmers see frameworks as tools for “weak” programmers that don’t understand how to write good, clean code. Whether this is true or not is up for debate, but the fact of the matter is that PHP frameworks are a tool that can be used to save time and tighten up one’s coding.

Zend is the leader among other frameworks. It is natural: it has been created by the developers of PHP language themselves and supports enterprise-solutions. Nevertheless, in the category “Breakthrough of the year” a young, but very ambitious framework Yii has won. I’ve decided to take a deeper look at this breakthrough, basing on our developers’ experience.

Yii is a framework for web programming of general purpose, that can be used for development of almost any kind of web-applications. Due to the presence of the advanced caching means, Yii is especially good for development of applications with a big traffic flow, such as portals, forums, content management systems (CMS), E-commerce systems etc.

Yii isespecially good for being flexible, practic and fast.

True, there is a simpler CodeIgniter. It is very fast and handy tool, for the beginners, in particular (there is plenty of documentation). But our experience has shown a very interesting pattern – solution of many tasks in CodeIgniter takes much more time, than solution of the same tasks in Yii. There was no task, that has been solved faster in CodeIgniter.
True, there is a more famous Zend framework. It has lots of various modules (almost for all cases), very elaborate architecture. But it is essentially slower, bigger, “heavier” than Yii. It suffers from some kind of “verbiage” – long class names, for example. What I mean is that it looks “heavy” even visually.
But if you need, you can use modules from Zend Framework, working in Yii.

Yii is a very fast, modern and flexible framework. It has many pluses:
– high speed of development
– high speed of work
– module, components and widgets support
– integration with Javascript framework jQuery
– comfortable work with database: it can be used either as Data Access Objects, or as Active Record
– convenient and flexible caching system and system of cache validating, memcached/xCache support
– handy built-in code generator Gii

Nowadays, there are many various PHP frameworks, and every developer decides for himself, which framework to use or not to use at all. Our programmers have marked out Yii pluses, though at the same time it doesn’t mean, that other frameworks are not useful at all.

Which framework do you use and why? I would love to see your comments here.