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.
Thank you for this introduction.
Now it would be nice to have a comparision between the different frameworks… 🙂
Using YII myself. The lack of ready to go modules/extensions for common things is frustrating at this early stage but only because I don’t have time to create these extensions myself. I find myself dipping back to codeigniter if I know there’s modules available which are going to solve the task already. It would be nice if more people using YII would release the modules they must have created back into the community.
I hear a lot of people complaining that they’d then have to maintain the module and don’t want that responsibility, but to me that’s a null argument. The reasons for which could probably account for a post in itself so I’ll spare you my rant. 😉
We built an open source CRM application (Zurmo.org) that is written in PHP utilizing JQuery, Yii, and RedBeanPHP and relies heavily on test driven development. Before we started building Zurmo, we looked at Yii, Cakephp, Zend, and Codeigniter. We felt Yii was a great framework because it was lightweight, fast, and clean. It had a full set of functionality and matched up well with the other frameworks. We are delighted with the decision.
we are using CakePHP, a similar framework (MVC, lightweight, code-by-convention, inspired by ruby on rails).
We testad many before choosing it, some good, some less. This is also a matter of “tastes” to some extent.
imho, framework are indispensable unless you are writing a very very simple site.
When I see a programmer proud of doing *anything* from scratch every time, I just thing he has time (and resources) to waste, non that he’s strong…
Yii’s flexibility is awesome and is lazy loading approach amazing… Since I started with Yii, I never looked back… easy to use, integrate, and extend…
Zend Framework, because it’s from zend and ZF2 is more innovative than ZF1 ..
Using Yii. But, using some ZF1 modules and ported some features from zend such as a response object. ZF2 looks pretty good.
YII is really reducing the development time. With less effort, I am able to do more. I dont know more on other frameworks, But it is better than codeigniter(I used this b4).
Yii is a high performance open source web application development framework that uses PHP for creating web 2.0 applications. Yii framework is one of the latest and most highly regarded PHP frameworks available in the market today.
Yiiiiiii <3
I was programming in YII three months ago, the results had been good, is the most powerful tool that I have tried. When yo write code under YII, you don’t need put any HTML label, and SQL instruction. Everything is encapsulated into objects and helpers. The validation rules is the best tool, you leave this dirty work to YII.
For the reason that the admin of this website is working, no doubt very quickly it will be renowned, due to its feature contents.
I am just getting started with Yii and it is a great framework. I was used to coding everything from scratch…not anymore!
I am just getting started with yii , and honestly , i think its a time saver and does a lot of stuff that is time consuming and takes care of a lot of security issues …
I also love the GII , its so cool and easy to use
I do accept as true with all of the concepts you
have introduced for your post. They’re very convincing and will definitely work. Nonetheless, the posts are very short for starters. Could you please extend them a little from next time? Thanks for the post.
Thanks for your comment ant interest.
Sure, next time I’ll try to do my best 🙂
i want to develop Student Management System …. suggest me which PHP framework should i go for??????
please reply its very urgent…..
I luv Yii..
We can’t say which one is the best. Those have some characteristics which meets our requirement, is the best for us.
I am just getting started with Yii2 and it is a great framework. easy to use.
I love YII. I can do a simple CRUD with login, logout, reset and remember me functionality in just a minute 🙂 You cannot do that in other Framework.