Yii : PHP Framework

I’ve been more than a year now using CodeIgniter. Despite the usual, and unsual features and limitations I’m still stuck in comfort using it, revising it to my own taste, blah blah blah.

The fact that I’m fully aware of its pros and cons, I can’t help but try to look and get curious at other PHP frameworks.

Just last friday, when I went to my former office. I was a little surprized. My friend TJ(my former boss) pointed my attention to some PHP frameworks he’s staring at. He showed me Yii and Kohana (I dunno if its just these two, if he showed me something else I ignored it ). I’m not using Kohana, but I do have my eye on it. I may not know a lot about it, but for the fact that he used it, and told me a series of dissapointing and embarassing times of Kohana had backed me away from it. I sticked to CodeIgniter then. I’m also aware of Zend framework. And I know enough that it can do a lot too. Still, I’m not comfortable about it. I don’t why either, if you tend to ask me.

Going further, Yii got my mind curious. The next day at home, I tried to look at it. But my eyes was tired enough that I head to bed, 15 inches away .

Today, After playing in a short while with Yii. I figured it’s pretty good enough to write something about it .

Yii is a high-performance component-based PHP framework for developing large-scale Web applications. Yii enables maximum reusability in Web programming and can significantly accelerate the development process. The name Yii (pronounced as [i:]) stands for easy, efficient and extensible.

Yii is easy to learn and use. You only need to know PHP and object-oriented programming. You are not forced to learn a new configuration or templating language.

Yii is extremely fast. Its overhead to applications written on top of it is negligible. As a matter of fact, it is one of the most efficient PHP frameworks around.

Yii is highly reusable and extensible. Yii is purely object-oriented. Everything in Yii is a self-contained component which can be configured, reused or extended easily. More importantly, Yii has an ever-increasing extension library consisting of user-contributed components, which may help reduce your development time significantly.

Yii comes with a rich set of features. From MVC, DAO/ActiveRecord, to theming, internationalization and localization, Yii provides nearly every feature needed by today’s Web 2.0 application development.

Yii has very detailed documentation. From the definitive guide to class reference, Yii has every information you need to quickly learn and master it.

Yii is carefully designed from the beginning to fit for serious Web application development. It is neither a byproduct of some project nor a conglomerate of third-party work. It is the result of the authors’ rich experience of Web application development and the investigation and reflection of the most popular Web programming frameworks and applications.

Last but not least, Yii is free! Yii uses the new BSD license, and it also ensures that the third-party work it integrates with use BSD-compatible licenses. This means it is both financially and lawfully free for you to use Yii to develop either open source or proprietary applications.

When I was playing with it, I had to create a webapp at the commandline. Which reminds me of other frameworks. But the fact that it has a  complete tutorial, documentation, and Class Reference, I manage to create a complete application in a seconds after reading.

Now, I’m still playing with it in-mind that it can potentially replace CodeIgniter from my arsenal.

I don’t mean to say that you should replace your all-time favorite framework. Just give it a try, and see for yourself