web2py vs Yii

web2py documentation does not follow the common pattern of using Sphinx, MkDocs or ReadTheDocs which is goos for exeperienced developers. Although documentation in form of a book is very easy and good for beginners. Turning web2py the most easy and comprehensive framework to learn and also to teach.

Web2py apps are designed to be portable. With some minor restrictions web2py apps can run on any VPS on SQL databases and/or Mongo, as well as on Google App Engine with the Google Datastore. It is truly code ones and run everywhere. For example at Camio.com we use web2py internally to access a GAE datastore which contains more images than Instagram.

The web2py community is open and friendly and it gives concrete support to newbies and old timers. It's not difficult to get answers from the BDFL Massimo Di Pierro himself.

One really positive aspect of web2py application is their maintainability over the years. Old code works even if the framework is updated to the latest version. Not only that, if code is written well it is very short and a new team can pick it up over in little time.

While web2py has its own web based IDE which is convenient, it works with WinIDE, PyCharm, and Eclipse. The first two explicitly support web2py. The latter requires some configuration.

web2py is very easy to learn for beginners, yet it has a great deal of power and flexibility as application needs become more complex. It includes an impressively comprehensive set of features, making development very productive without the need to integrate a lot of third-party libraries.

The framework is really fast in production after some optimization and fine tuning which can minimize the memory footprint in order to make it run on a really small VPS or slice.

Allows users to easily extend functionality by using external libraries.

Models and controllers live in the context of the HTTP request. So the developer does not have to import the API to access this context at every request.

In other words, the models, controllers and templates in web2py use a domain specific language which uses pure web2py syntax and allows to import any module but exposes a few additional objects.

web2py includes an "admin" app that serves as a web-based IDE for web2py applications. It includes many features, such as application creation, compiling, and packaging; an error ticketing system; a code editor; a debugger; a controller doctest runner; Git and Mercurial integration; and one-click deployment to PythonAnywhere, Google App Engine, and OpenShift.

It is not intended as a full desktop IDE replacement, but it includes some helpful web2py specific functionality and can be convenient for basic editing and debugging tasks and quick prototyping, even for those who primarily work with a more full-featured desktop IDE or editor.

Yii takes care of repetitive tasks through Gii, a web-based scaffolding tool. Gii takes care of code generation and creating code templates for:

• Models
• Controllers
• Forms
• Modules
• Extensions
• CRUD controller actions and views
• There are a lot of scaffolding templates made by community for Gii, that improve generated code functionality by a lot.
• Gii is very easy to extend yourself.

Since security is a crucial part of any application, Yii comes with great security features out of the box to help developers create a secure and reliable application. These security features contain but are not restricted to:

• Input validation
• Output filtering
• Features against SQL injection
• Cross-site scripting prevention

Yii is built to be extremely extensible. Virtually every component of the framework can be extended programmatically. For example, if you want to add a unique id to your views, it's very easy to do:

namespace app\components;

class View extends yii\web\View {

    public $bodyId;

    /* Yii allows you to add magic getter methods by prefacing method names with "get" */

    public function getBodyIdAttribute() {
        return ($this->bodyId != '') ? 'id="' . $this->bodyId . '"' : '';
    }

}

Yii makes use of Codeception, a great PHP testing framework that helps developers run their tests. They can be unit, functional or acceptance tests since Codeception supports them all.

Yii has about 2000 addons hosted on Yii's official website. These addons significantly decrease development time and increase the developer's efficiency.

Yii is free and open source and is distributed under the BSD License.

Yii has a strong and rather large community behind it. This is proven by the great number of blog posts, tutorials, guides and reviews on the Yii framework as well as the great number of extensions developed for it.

Yii uses Composer to handle it's dependency installation. This is rather easy and not very time consuming, although it should be noted that Composer is very resource-intensive considering what it's job is. But that is not really Yii's fault.

Yii Framework Provides most of features require for crud functionalities like GridView, Listview and DetailView (with jquery search and validation functions) by generating using GII.