In the PHP Framework, Yii is coming as one of the latest frameworks which are preferred by the PHP developers as well the entrepreneurs. What makes Yii special?

At Matrix Marketers, our PHP developers have completed few projects using Yii and here we are listing some features of Yii Framework.

Fast

A framework is tested by measuring RPS (Request per second)and while measuring for Yii enabled projects, the difference is quite big when we enable APC extension in PHP.

Framework comparison

Yii is probably the PHP’s answer to JS framework when it comes to speed. Yii is light weight with the optimized code.

CRUD Feature

Yii got the CRUD feature. This literally saves heaps of time and makes our process much easier. For instance, If we are building a user creation form, we just need to create the User Table and the required fields in the database.

Database tables as objects

We can create model instances. The database modification with these model instances helps you to avoid complex queries and make your tasks easy. Yii applications can be switched to different databases without any difficulties. Yii got a query builder, and it generates the query. This prevents SQL injection and other attacks.

The ORM approach turns tables into classes and rows into objects.

Relations

Relations are one of highlight features of Yii. You can define the relation between multiple tables say One to One, One to Many etc so that we access the related data in a single object avoiding all the complex JOIN (Inner, model .Outer ) queries of SQL.

Consider two tables User and Profile. User table contains the authentication details and Profile table contains the personal details of the user. We have defined a Has One relation (User have one profile) in the model.

Easy Form Validation.

Form validation is important for any website. Using Yii, you can connect your forms with the models (database tables). You can set validation rules for the model. For instance, consider a User model (the user database table for user registration ) and there is a field username in it.

Great support for Jquery and Ajax.

Yii has Ajax and jQuery support for date picker which is the support for widgets. This way, Ajax requests can be sent to inbuilt ajax buttons in Yii.

Inbuilt Authentication and Authorization

Authentication

Yii has a default login system, in which we can authorize our user. We just need to connect our User model into it. Session, cookies and error handling is done uniquely to not to affect the actual working of the system.

Authorization

Yii got inbuilt role based access controls through which we can create roles to the users. We can limit the access to different sections based on the roles.

Theming

Yii has its own inbuilt theme directory which can be used to provide various types of functionality. We can switch easily to different themes inside the config file. This helps the designers to implement designs very easily.

Web Services (API Support).

Yii helps the easy generation of web services. We can create an action and define a web service action to it (just 1 line code). And if we try to access the action as a URL what we see would be a bulk of XML contents.

Error Handling

Yii provides great support for error handling. To handle PHP warnings and notices, Yii has handleError and handleExcpetion methods.Yii, we can raise exceptions (there are lots of built-in exceptions). For example, if a user is requesting an invalid page, we can handle it by just adding,

Also Read: PHP Developers opt for Best PHP Framework for Web 2.0 Applications: Yii

Security

Yii is highly secured. Three major types of attacks to a website are.

Cross-site Scripting (XSS)

A typical example is an attack in a poorly made up forum. The user can enter malicious javascript code to the forum and it will appear on the forum page. Cross-site Request Forgery(CSRF)

Mainly these are money loss attacks.

Cookie attacks

Yii got a cookie validation method, which blocks cookies from being modified.

Extensions

Yii does have lots of extensions. somewhat like plugins for WordPress. This makes the complicated development and 3rd party API handling very easy for yii. The twitter bootstrap extension is one of the most rated Yii extension. This helps you to integrate Twitter Bootstrap into your application easily.

Yii Extensions

Testing

Yii does have Unit testing and functional testing feature, which helps you in testing and improving your code quality.

Great Documentation

Yii is known for its elaborated documentation. Each and every single method is documented clearly and thoroughly.

Conclusion

Yii framework is useful for developing complex web applications in which many processes are to be maintained simultaneously. However, Small applications can also be developed to meet the competency. To hire PHP developers using Yii framework, you may contact us!