Web Designing/Development

What Is Yii Framework And Why Use It?

What is Yii framework and why use it?

The Yii is a next-generation, efficient, and secure PHP framework that is based on components. As we know a PHP framework is a platform to create PHP web applications that provide libraries of code or functions for common tasks for a faster, secure, efficient, and easy development process of the robust and modern web application.

Version history -
Yii has been launched in December 2008. There are two main versions of the Yii - 1.1 and 2.0. The new version 2.0 is a complete rewrite of Yii launched in October 2014 which uses the latest technologies and protocols of PHP including Composer, PSR, namespace, traits, and many more. The current stable release of Yii is 2.0.45

Requirements and prerequisites -
Yii 2.0 requires PHP 5.4.0 or above and works(recommended) best with the latest version of PHP 7.

Database Interaction  -
It uses and supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, or Oracle databases

Licensing -
Yii is released under the fixed terms of the BSD License. It is free software so you can use it freely for creating modern applications. The Yii documentation is licensed to the public under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) so you can copy, distribute and/or modify it.

Architecture -
Yii applications use the Model View Controller(MVC) approach for organizing the whole application. The Model part is used for storing the business logic and rules, and application data. The view acts as a presentation layer that shows the data passed by the model. The controllers take user input from view and convert it to in command for passing it to Model.

You can install Yii using the "Yii2 installation using composure method" help article.

Why should you use Yii -
The following are the facts and reasons that will explain to you for implementing the Yii framework in your web application -

Quick application development -
In Yii, you can start, run and launch the application quickly in minutes.

Architecture -
It implements MVC(Model View Controller) design approach for efficient code organization.

Documentation -
The Yii guide and documentation is well written and provide an easy learning process for different aspects of the Yii framework.

Ready-to-use features -
It provides many inbuilt ready-made codes or features e.g. - Gii code generator, query builders and ActiveRecord, RESTful API development support, multi-tier caching support, etc.

Third-party supports -
The Yii is very extensible for customization and code management and supports running third-party code within the Yii application.

Secure and strong security supports -
The Yii maintains strong security measures for example - bcrypt password hashing, encryption, authentication, preventing SQL injection, XSS, and CSRF attacks.

Efficient caching system to speed up application load -
It uses different types of a strong and efficient way of caching technology to speed up application performance e. g. – HTTP, data, fragment, page caching.

Yii framework community -
There are multiple mediums available for the Yii framework community e.g. - forum, Facebook group, hall of fame, badges, etc. For live chat - the Yii community offers instant help or support either via Slack or IRC channel.

Best for -
It can be used for developing different types of web application that uses PHP as a scripting language. It is very suitable for developing large-scale applications - e. g. web portals, content management systems(CMS), blogs, forums, e-commerce web projects, RESTful web services etc.