Chapter 1. Meet Yii
The past several years have marked a significant 'framework boom', and almost everyone involved in web application development these days is a part of a new generation of 'framework boomers'. Web development frameworks help jumpstart your application by immediately delivering the core foundation and plumbing needed to quickly turn your ideas scribbled on the whiteboard into a functional and production-ready code. With all of the common features expected from web applications today and available framework options that meet these expectations, there is little reason to code your next web application from scratch. A modern, flexible, and extensible framework is almost as essential a tool as the programming language itself to today's web developer. Moreover, when the two are particularly complementary, the results are an extremely powerful toolkit: Java and Spring, Ruby and Rails, C# and .NET, and PHP and Yii.
Yii is the brainchild of its founder Qiang Xue who started the development of this open source framework on January 1st, 2008. Prior to this, Qiang had previously developed and maintained the PRADO framework for many years. The years of experience and user feedback cultivated from the PRADO project solidified the need for a much easier, more extensible and more efficient PHP5-based framework to meet the ever-growing needs of application developers. The initial alpha version of Yii was officially released to meet these needs in October of 2008. Its extremely impressive performance metrics when compared to other PHP-based frameworks immediately drew very positive attention. On December 3rd, 2008, Yii 1.0 was officially released and as of March 14th, 2010, the latest production-ready version is 1.1.2. It has a growing development team and continues to gain popularity among PHP developers everyday. We feel that with just a little help from the information contained in this book, you will soon understand why.
The name Yii (an acronym for Yes, it is, pronounced as Yee or [ji:]) stands for easy, efficient, and extensible. Yii is a high-performance, component-based, web application framework written in PHP 5. Yii makes it easier to create and maintain large-scale web applications. It also makes them more efficient and extensible. Let's take a quick look at each of these characteristics of Yii in turn.
