Why Is Yii Framework Getting Great Popularity?

What is so special about Yii? Why is it becoming so popular among developers today? Let's dwell on it a little and find the answers.

Yii (acronym for ‘Yes It Is!') is a component-based PHP framework with high performance level that best fits for developing Web applications of large scale. Yii comes with a full pack of features covering DAO/ActiveRecord, MVC, caching, I18N/L10N, jQuery-based AJAX support, authentication and role-based access control, input validation, scaffolding, events, widgets, Web services, theming etc.

Yii is written using OOP principles and therefore it is very flexible and extensive as well as it is easy to use. Yii has a large community and as a result a lot of solutions in the form of extensions. There is good support with an ability to offer changes and improvements on Github. Moreover, Yii has publicly available excellent documentation.

Yii was created for web programming of general purpose which can be used for development of basically any sort of web applications. Thanks to the presence of the powerful caching tool, Yii is particularly effective for rapid applications development with a big traffic flow such as forums, CMS, portals, eCommerce systems etc. It is known for its flexibility, usability and high speed. Among its other advantages Yii supports modules, components and widgets as well as integrates with JavaScript framework jQuery. It can also be utilized either as Active Record or as Data Access Objects. In addition Yii has a convenient web-based code generator called Gii and there is a command line interface for some operations like DB migrations.

Many developers, after having dealt with Yii are left totally impressed by the framework. Lots of them agree that the learning curve is pretty short thanks to its ability to eliminate duplicating code and automatic adapting to the database changes. Security issues are also taken care of due to the input validation functionality of CModel and the usage of PDO and parameter binding by CActive Record and making the operations safe by default.

In comparison with other popular frameworks Yii holds the highest positions. Here is how Top 10 Hot PHP Frameworks and Top 10 Ranking PHP Frameworks look:

Another source shows combined score by which Yii wins over a number of other popular frameworks:

We at Zfort Group have been successfully using Yii framework for a number of highly-customized web projects. It was selected to be the primary solution for custom projects in our company after meticulous research performed by our internal R&D department. They have looked into several most popular solutions available on the market such as Symfony (both 1.4 and 2.0), CodeIgniter, and others. Yii appeared to have the best ratio of scalability, security and performance out of all of them.

With all the facts mentioned above it becomes pretty obvious why Yii framework picks up steam every month. What about you? Are you using Yii in your work and if not, what do you prefer and why?