Yii is a high-performance, component-based PHP framework for developing large-scale Web applications rapidly. The name Yii is an acronym for “Yes It Is!”.

Is it fast? … Is it secure? … Is it professional? … Is it right for my next project? … Yes, it is!

It is light-weight and equipped with sophisticated caching mechanisms, it is especially suited to high-traffic applications, such as portals, forums, content management systems, e-commerce systems, etc.

YII is a free open source web application development frame work. It is developed in PHP5. It has the extremely optimized. It’s high and impressive performance while comparing with other PHP-based frameworks.

Why YII?

YII has the below features:

  1.  MVC
  2. DAO/ActiveRecord
  3. Caching
  4. Authentication
  5. Role-based access control
  6. Scaffolding
  7. Security

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 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 functionality no matter it is used or not during a request.

1. Performance

YII has the high performance compared to other frame works. The YII team has 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. Caching

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.