Why use Yii framework for the development of high power web applications



We have been hearing a lot about PHP frameworks and their advantages in developing web applications, of late. Yii is one such framework with many advantages to its credit. This open source framework is now the most sought after framework among developers for the development of high power web applications. Not one, but many reasons contribute to making it a famous framework. In this post, let's gain some insights in this regard.

Development of applications using this high-performance framework is fast, secure and professional. Fast, because, only the features that are required are loaded. Secure, because, hacking techniques like XSS, SQL injection, cookie tampering are prevented and it includes input validation, output filtering, cross-site scripting prevention. Professional, because, it allows a Yii developer to write clean, reusable code and follows model-view-controller architectural pattern. Apart from these factors, its unique and cutting-edge features make it the best for developing web applications.

5 features that make Yii the best for application development

Model-view-controller design pattern:
The MVC pattern is extensively adopted in web programming. This pattern comes in handy to developers, as they can very easily change every single part without affecting other parts. The model represents data and business rules; view consists of elements, namely text, form inputs; controller governs the communications across model and view.

Authentication and Authorization:
A web page should be restricted only to certain users. For this, authorization and authentication are needed. While authentication is to ascertain whether a user is who he claims to be, authorization, on the other hand, is to find if the identified person has the permission to manipulate particular resources.

Form input and validation:
Developers have to populate the form by giving existing data, validate user input, present suitable error messages and save the input to storage. All this process is simplified with the help of Yii's MVC pattern.

Theming and skinning:
Web application pages can be customized in a systematized way using theming. A dramatic change in the appearance of a web application can be felt by applying a theme. Every individual theme in Yii framework is represented as a directory. The directory contains view files, images, layout files, javascript files, CSS files, etc. Through skinning, the outlook of the widgets that are utilized in the views can be easily customized.

Automatic code generation:
Yii is provided with a code generating tool known as Gii. To make use of Gii, the application configuration has to be first modified. This tool is executed in connection with a module and has to be used within an existing Yii application.