Just wanted to post some quick thoughts after spending a few days with the
yii PHP Framework.
I have been looking for the "perfect" web development framework for a number of years. I've had quite a bit of experience with a relatively lightweight PHP framework called
CodeIgniter, which i quite like, and I have spent quite a bit of time trying to use the
Drupal CMS system as a framework for custom web application coding, which i have
vocally warned people to avoid.
You could sum up my current thinking about frameworks as highly dubious of anything fancy. My experience is that the more minimalist the better -- less to go wrong, and less exotic code that does some stuff in super-clever ways but makes other stuff insanely convoluted. The more a framework tries to do stuff in some clever automatic way, or enforces some elaborate structure, the more painful it is to use when you inevitably need to do real-world stuff.
I spent quite a bit of time this year looking at Python frameworks -- hoping to switch from php web development to python web development -- but concluded that at the current time, deploying python web applications is a total joke and a catastrophe for anything other than a scenario where you are running a single python web application on a server. I also didn't fall in love with Django, Pylons, or the other major python web frameworks.
So anyway, I decided to experiment a bit with yii. It's much newer than CodeIgniter but shares much of the same focus on being minimalist and fast.
However, it is substantially "heavier" than CodeIgniter in many areas -- providing some very cool form and data handling classes. I'm still unsure about how much of a cost these features will inflict when it comes time to do some non-standard stuff, and i would prefer that it didn't do quite so much "magic" stuff behind the scenes. In this respect I think i still prefer CodeIgniter.
However there is one area in which yii would seem to me to be a really clear win -- and that's what inspired me to post -- the quick construction of scaffolding code (controllers, models, views) automatically from existing database tables.
That is, if you have a legacy database that you want to build a web application around, yii has some absolutely fantastic tools for automatically creating controllers/models/views that will let users browse, view, create, edit entries in the database. Normally I would avoid such features, but there is no denying that for some projects this might represent a huge time savings.
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