A survey (by Dxgsofts) on some of the most popular PHP frameworks saw that Yii is amongst the top 5 most used PHP frameworks. “Yes It is” or Yii is an open source, MVC based, object oriented, light weighted PHP framework. It is primarily popular amongst developers for general purpose web programming.Yii has garnered popularity because of the presence of advanced caching meaning. It means that, Yii is useful for web applications with high traffic flow, such as eCommerce sites and forums.
Let us look at some of the business benefits of using Yii Framework:
1. Shortened Development Time:
Yii offers quite a few tools to automate many of the repetitive tasks in projects. This allows developers to focus their time and attention on core business requirements and business logic. One such tool is called “Gii”. Gii helps in automatic code template creation for Models, Controllers, Forms, Modules, and Extensions. Gii is completely configurable offering developers the complete flexibility they need in creating scalable and customized code.
2. Security:
Yii offers a number of security mechanisms such as XSS, Cross Site Scripting and also CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) prevention. Here is how Yii handles the three most prominent security concerns –
- When a web applicable gathers data from users, for example in forums, then there are chances of malicious code being injected into the posts. Yii offers a very useful component known as the CHtmlPurifier which removes the harmful data and ensures that the filtered content follows the standards.
- Yii also offers CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery) validation by default. CSRF Prevention occurs when harmful website causes a user’s browser to perform an unwanted action on a trusted site. Yii implements a CSRF prevention scheme to help defeat the POST based attacks.
- To avoid Cookie attacks, Yii offers a cookie validation technique that prevents cookies from being modified. It basically does HMAC (Hash-based message authentication code) check for the cookie values if they are enabled.
3. Caching:
Caching is a very effective way to improve the performance of a web application. It helps in reducing the response time and improves the speed and performance of the web application. Yii allows easy integration of a cache application component.
Yii provides various cache components such as:
cMemCache – memcache makes use of the spare RAM in many servers to act as a memory cache for frequently accessed pieces of information.
cDummyCache – This contains dummy cache that does not do caching at all. This component is used to simplify the code that needs to check the availability of cache.
cFileCache – This uses files to store cached data.
4. Easy Configuration:
Installing Yii is extremely easy and simple. The basic structure can be downloaded from Yii Framework website or it can also be downloaded through the composer.
Once the structure is downloaded and the files are extracted, developers need to simply connect the files with the database, then give the configuration of the database which lies in the configuration file, and it is ready to run.
5. Huge Community Support:
Yii has a great community support. It offers various features like forums and discussion groups, live chat, news, and hall of fame. There is a feature of adding badges wherein; developers can earn badges by meeting the certain set criteria. The criteria are mentioned at Yii Framework community. There is also unlimited support available in the form of various plugins and other components.
