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The Yii PHP Framework

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mouser:
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.

f0dder:
Did you ever take a look at CakePHP?

mouser:
I took a very long look at CakePHP a couple of years ago.. It was a toss up between that and CodeIgniter for a big project.  I went with CodeIgniter because I wanted something leaner and more lightweight.

f0dder:
OK, just popped into mind because you mentioned Yii does model/view/controller.

bscott:
We have been down the same road. I looked at CakePHP but went with CodeIgniter because I preferred less magic. I have spent some time with Drupal and am not quite as averse to it as you - but then I haven't tried to use the Forum module.

Recently I have looked at Python frameworks starting with Django which I initially quite liked but then felt it was too heavyweight for me but it does have a good admin feature for rapid CRUD. I then took a brief look at Pylons and Turbogears neither of which were to my taste: Pylons has gone into maintenance mode and Turbogears makes too many decisions for me.

I am currently looking at Pyramid which I am quite taken with - it strikes me as the Codeigniter of the Python world.

I will now add Yii to my list (which never gets any shorter).

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