Hello Friends, As we know that PHP become one of the most popular web scripting language to develop dynamic web applications. With the advancements in technology, there are lots of frameworks introduced for PHP which provides different features. Most of the frameworks follows the MVC architecture to define a standard architecture for application development. There are a number of good PHP frameworks available such as Cake, Zend, CodeIgniter, Laravel etc.

      In this article I would like to introduce you with one of advanced framework for PHP i.e 'Yii', which is created to meet the requirements of future web application development. As I am also new and just started learning Yii framework, Just want to share my reading with you all, So I am writing my first blog on Yii framework to provide an introduction of Yii 2.0 framework.

Introduction :

Yii is a pure OOP based, component-based and high performance open-source PHP framework for developing large scale web applications rapidly. As defined on its official website [1], Yii is also pronounced as 'Yee or [ji:]' which means "simple and evolutionary" in chinese. It is used to developing any kind of web applications using PHP due to its component based architecture and advance caching mechanism.

Version History :

The first version 1.0 released on 2008.

Currently there are two major versions of Yii available :

• version 1.1 : released in 2010 and now in maintenance mode.
• version 2.0 : First stable version of Yii 2.0 release in October,2014.

Yii 2.0 is a complete rewrite of Yii on top of PHP 5.4 with addition of latest technologies and features such as Composer, namespaces and traits, Active Records etc.

As mentioned in [2], Current version 2.0.7 also supports PHP7.

Requirements :

As I started with Yii 2.0, So i have mentioned the system requirements for Yii 2.0.  For other version you can check the requirements on official website of Yii.

System Requirements : Yii 2.0 requires PHP version 5.4 or above.

Prerequisites : Yii is a pure OOP based framework and uses latest features of PHP such as namespaces and traits, So basic knowledge of OOP and understanding of new features will be helpful to learn about its working.

Features of Yii :

1. Based on MVC Architecture.
2. Database Access Objects (DAO), Query Builder, Active Record and Migrations made easy to build database-oriented applications.
3. Built in Authentication and authorization support.
4. Form Input, validation, built-in ajax support and lot of other useful widgets.
5. Layered caching scheme supports different types of caching such as data caching, page caching etc.
6. Provides support for error handling and logging.
7. Provide support for unit and functional testing of application.
8. Supports Internationalization and Localization to translate application into localized version.
9. Provides many security measures to minimizes the security risks for web services and application.
10. Gii tool : Yii's buit-in code generation tool.
11. Yii work well with third party tools such as PEAR and Zend framework, It also have an extension library which provides different components and widgets.

Resources :

There are lot of resources available on internet for learning Yii, Below is the list of some useful resources which can be helpful to learn Yii.

• Yii 2.0 Definitive Guide
• Yii 2.0 API

References :-

[1] http://www.yiiframework.com/doc-2.0/guide-intro-yii.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yii