Yii, a PHP framework

May 14, 2014

Yii Beta version 2.0

Yii 2.0 is claimed to be a complete rewrite of the existing Yii 1.x framework. Yii 2.0 adopts newer technologies and conventions, including Composer, PSR-4 autoloading class path conventions, namespaces, traits and more. It requires PHP 5.4.0 or better.

Yii describes itself as a component-based MVC (model, view, controller) full-stack PHP framework.

// Notes:

Routing is somewhat more complex and arcane than with other full-stack frameworks. It's more difficult to decipher what the actual URL should be to get to a given piece of code and causes some small amount of frustration in this.

While Yii claims to be high performance, and ranks above Zend 2, Symfony 2, Cake PHP and Fuel PHP in several benchmarks, it does crazy inefficient database schema derivations on every page request, no matter how simple. On a simple request, this schema overhead is the single largest piece of database execution time for a page! I'm sure there's a good reason for it, but it's not suggestive of a high-performance framework for lightweight pages.