YII is a free open source web application development frame work written in php5. It has the extremely optimized performance and it is a perfect choice for any kind of projects. Its high and impressive performance while comparing with other PHP-based frameworks immediately drew very positive attention. Its popularity and adoption continues to grow at an ever increasing rate.

YII is the fastest PHP frame work best for creating large scale Web2.0 applications. YII can be used for developing any kind of web applications. It is especially suited for high traffic web applications like portals,forum, social media sites and so on. The name YII(pronounced as ‘yee’) is the abbreviation of “Yes It Is”. Obviously it is the answer for the questions like:

Is it fast? … Is it secure? … Is it professional? … >> Yes, it is!

Why YII?

YII has the features like MVC,DAO/ActiveRecord,caching, authentication and role-based access control, scaffolding, testing and so on. It is light weight and has powerful caching support. Security is a part of this frame work. It includes input validation, output filtering, SQL injection and Cross-site scripting prevention.

YII is much faster because it is using lazy loading technique. It does not enable a functionality until or unless that has been invoked for the first time. For example it does not create an object unless the object is called for the first time. Other frameworks suffer from the performance hit because they would enable a functionality no matter it is used or not during a request.

1. Performance.

YII has the extreme performance compared to other frame works. The YII team have generated a statistics for the performance of different frame works based on “request per second” which describes how many requests an application written in a framework can process per second. From the graph given below the RPS is for “request per second”. The higher number shows the higher performance level of the frame work. The performance is significantly high when we enable the PHP extension APC.

2. Security.

Security measures like Cross-site Scripting Prevention, Cross-site Request Forgery Prevention and Cookie Attack Prevention are enabled. Also YII includes client side and server side validation. We can just enable or disable the validation rule. It is not required to write separate validation rule for the inputs like other frameworks. YII has built-in authentication support. It also supports authorization via hierarchical role-based access control.

3. Best Caching features.

YII provides various cache components to store cached data in different media. While comparing to other frame works YII has an excellent caching system. YII supports memcache, APC, XCache and DB based page and segment caching.

4. Friendly with third-party code

YII is also designed to work with third party codes. You can use code from PEAR or Zend Framework in your YII application.

5. Easy to extend / customize

It is very easy to edit or customize the YII based applications, since it has a very simple code structure. You can also use different kinds of extensions and widgets as per the requirements.

YII is purely object oriented, architecturally clean and very simple to extend it. If you are not experienced with the PHP frame works and want to develop some simple applications, then maybe you should try an easier framework. I recommend to everyone who knows object oriented programming should pick up YII and try it once.