What is Yii?

Yii is a free and open source framework for PHP, meaning it's a library of functions that help you get your website up and running faster.

It uses the model-view-controller pattern, which means less spaghetti code.

It has a pretty good code generator called Gii, that lets you save time writing code to connect to your database.

It uses the ActiveRecord pattern for object-relational mapping, which means less SQL to write.

It might be faster than other frameworks, as it loads components only when needed.

I also use these technologies with Yii:
  • Netbeans integrated development environment, with Xdebug
  • MySQL database, though we are switching to Postgres
  • ExtJS front-end
  • Apache web server