Is it really that easy?

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
21

what i meant was to start with clear and simple examples with no missing steps. This will really help both beginners and professional PHP programmesrs in picking up Yii quickly. LIke I said before, nobody can figure out the syntax on their own because each framework has its own syntax and workflow.

I don’t believe Yii is difficult to learn. All you need is one video tutorial perhaps 15 to 20 minutes long to show the workflow & syntax with no missing steps. After about a week of using Yii I am now alot more comfortable with the syntax and the workflow but i need to explore more… :P

22

Only talking about one case: there’s a security problem and you have to fix for yourself. Yii allows you to do that.

Could be cynical and say: Maybe then better check out M$ if they have something to point & click for you ;) .

IMHO:

Yii is a professional, but still easy to grasp tool - but it doesn’t free you from thinking. Every real professional wants to know the tool he’s working with and spends time, getting used to and understanding it. Thinking that the tool “will do my job” guarantees failure of a project on the long term as you’ll never learn to help yourself. If on the other hand you’re willing to learn how to get the best out of the tools you use, you’re perfect with Yii.

23

Agree is a professional tool and as a professional tool I would expect a decent period of maintenance. That’s all.

M$??? Hell I’d rather code my own framework. B)

24

Please forgive me for being blunt here, but the entire point of "community" powered software is for the community (also meaning the people who are commercially utilizing Yii) to help make it better. There would have been no Yii beyond the first versions if everyone went just using it without contributing something back.

my 2cents…

25

Hmm, I don’t know how you arrived at this conclusion, I guess I didn’t make myself clearly understood, sorry for that.

My main issue is not about giving back, every time I find a possible fix/improvement I will make it public here and the heades here can pick it up and include it in the framework. See the thread I opened in feature requests awhile back. And as you say, this is the point of a community.

As my previous reply I believe that having 1 year of maintenace of a major version is a short time. I don’t even release my application that I developed over the last year (hypotetically) and have to upgrade the library to make sure I’m up to date regarding security!

Doing the security updates myself is a no go. First, I most likely will not be aware of all new security problems. Second, doing it by myself is a lot harder and prone to errors than doing it inside yii comunity. Guys, am I the only one who sees things this way? :huh:

26

I hardly think we will have many security updates at all - the core is written with security in mind all the time. It’s rather your application code that might need updates if you introduced any security issues. Guess that’s why no one cares much.

27

Fair enough.

P.S. I love yii. :rolleyes:

28

The problem, like i have mentioned in another post is not the framework but the documentation. I am not even sure if its about spending more time on writing the documentation itself. After i have read the yii guide my feeling was that more time should have been spent on designing the information before writing it on paper. Perhaps i could make useful suggestions from time to time on what to include in the guide…if anyone is interested in listening… :rolleyes:

29

I see your point now.

30

I dont came here with the idea of put on discussion your background nor mine but it really seems that you lack from the experience of working in an enterprise or with large project.

Now the problem with maintenance period is not only related to security but also with core functionalities, stability and some bugs; php is well know for introducing series of "mini-bugs" from different versions, the most recent i can recall is with the preg_quote changes in php 5.3, which actually fixes a problem with but introduced lots of problem with some software which depends on this tiny little thing to sanitize/validate certain data like the one m using right now: IPB, which used preg_quote on several parts like the user validation while registration.

Now you start wondering how good could Yii do the project, while certainly will/could improve your developing performance it could also make some future problems since as say before sometimes you nor have the time or resources to go out backporting fixes, and it is suppose that if you are using a framework is for avoiding this kind of issues so large-periods of maintenance should be considered if of course the Yii-team want to be taken as serious plataform to be doing bussines with it (isnt this the reason to initially adopt BSD-license over a GPL-icense?).

This thread is begin to start loosing his goal, which ask other developers about their own experiences with it as say before m a noob in this yii territory and of course m trying to learn what makes easy really worth to adopt.

As of the moment performance is kinda a cool thing here but i can do the same with Code Igniter and Symfony, obviously they arent out-of-the-box prepared but the same performance can be achieved with no problems too.

Regards

31

The maintenance period is actually 2 years, not 1 year (yii 1.1.0 was released in Jan 2010 and will be maintained till Dec 2011).

This is actually a minimum commitment, meaning that if there is need, we may extend the maintenance period.

Also if we find any security hole, we will build a patch for all versions, regardless of their maintenance period.

Sorry for not stating the above clearly in our site.

32

What makes Yii good is that it is very flexible, structured, fast, and easy. I started out evaluating a lot of different frameworks, from CodeIgniter to Symphony to Kohana to Cake to whatever else was out there.

It came down to CodeIgniter and Yii and we went with Yii. Over CodeIgniter it’s benefits are built in Auth & ACL, coded in PHP 5, and more open development. Most other frameworks had certain lock-ins that would not enable you to do something that should be simple without jumping through a lot of hoops. CodeIgniter seemed very slow for development (of new things) and all focus was on their commercial product. User contributions are pretty much ignored unless it fits in to their new product. I see they still haven’t released v2.0 :blink:

Nothing against CodeIgniter, it’s a nice framework, I just like Yii better because the process seems more open. I’ve seen a lot of cool ideas kicked around here and eventually included in Yii (I’ve even contributed to a feature which got included). And Yii seems to move faster.

I don’t have a problem with the 1 (or 2) year support. The web is a platform that is constantly being innovated on and upgraded. A framework that is over a year old is possibly already outdated, and the only way it can stay alive is if it constantly reinvents itself (I actually think this is true of all frameworks, not just web). At the same time being a developer I understand not wanting to rewrite applications over and over, but it doesn’t take long with Yii and I’d rather see the platform evolve then stagnate because it spends all it’s time on older versions.

We have been using Yii on a major project (over a year of development) since Yii 1.0.0 and I have upgraded Yii each time on a new release. It’s usually not that big of job at all. We are currently using Yii 1.1.2. And Yii has been really simple, I thought it was as simple as CodeIgniter.

33

This is the kind of answer I liked to see, thanks a lot giang! And sorry for not seeing the actual maintenance period, it is indeed 2 years. I believe you better make it clear somewhere on the website when you have time, it is important for businesses. Thanks again!

34

ummm it is ‘qiang’ not ‘giang’ :)

and no Yii is not the ‘easiest’ framework to learn, but it is easier than others and yes it is very worth learning. I have used CodeIgniter and others (Kohana, Cake, Symfony, etc…) and have my likes and dislikes about all of these. Yii was a bit intimidating at first but quickly showed it’s power and ease the more I dug into it.

I am no Yii expert yet but I can promise you I can have the shell of a web app up with all pages needed for create, read, update, delete (CRUD) records in my database in place and role based access control (RBAC) in less than an hour.

That is a feature I love about Yii. While other developers are still fiddling with with config files and other tedious jobs in other frameworks I am already deep into coding the meat of my application! Yii (via yiic and gii) has handled many of the more tedious aspects for me and allowed me to move on to some real application logic tasks.

Also, the abstraction of data retrieval & display as well as many other objects (like forms, links, form validation, etc) is a real time saver. This again makes me consider Yii ‘easy’.

Sure most frameworks abstract these items as well, but not all frameworks abstract them well (poorly documented and cumbersome methods), or sometimes they abstract them to the point of obfuscation (no docs and no obvious methods)!

One last point, Yii has a nice book written to teach you how to use it as well.

I would advise any that have questions on learning Yii to buy the book ‘Agile Web Application Development with Yii 1.1 and PHP5’.

I have read this book cover to cover and wrote the whole application that the author uses as example in the book. It was an amazing read that teaches loads about Yii and what it can do! There are some mistakes in the book, but the author (Jeff Winesett) has a page in the Yii forums showing all corrections and is very helpful in understanding the concepts in the book.

Yes, thats right he is also one of the authors of Yii so you get taught by the people that create the framework by buying this book. What more can you ask for?

35

@David:

Why are you digging up old topics? :)

To the OP (who doesn’t care because it’s been 6.5 months since the topic started):

MVC is difficult - especially when you haven’t used it before.

Once it finally clicks, Yii is easy to get used to.

IMO, it beat the competition squarely in the knackers.B)

36

I’m a beginner with Yii, and I have to agree that it is ‘not that easy’. But, I am also novice with MVC and OOP (I have tinkered but never really developed with them), and as many have said that can make it much more challenging. However, things are slowly coming together as I doggedly stick with it, and I am beginning to see what all the hullabaloo is about. There is a promise twinkling on the horizon, the promise of an era of rapid internet application development to be ushered in by Yii that I can just start to make out. In the process, I am hoping that the rigorous nature of the framework will enforce good OOP practices; so far it certainly seems so. Anyway, I am very happy to be here, and want to thank the development team (especially Qiang) for sharing such a rich (albeit complex) framework with ‘the rest of us’.