Grails vs Yii

Grails is an abstraction over Spring and Hibernate. This makes Grails applications fast and scalable. This is because both Spring and Hibernate are themselves scalable.

Grails is a full-stack web framework, not just MVC. It contains a lot of stuff out of the box, but it doesn’t enforce it. It contains over 900 plugins which provide a Groovy API for a lot of useful and well-known Java libraries. And what is more important is that they are super easy to install!

Setting up a new project is quite fast and code generation (scaffolding) saves you a lot of time. It also uses a convention over configuration principle which helps you bypass all the configuration trouble.

Grails also comes with a reloading mechanism out of the box.

Grails is designed to be a rapid development framework with a straight learning curve. It advocates convention over configuration. Extensibility is very simple when using plugins (there is a lot of them). One command in the console – and all the dependencies and configurations are managed for you.

Do you need something advanced in the UI? You can either create it in GSP with an addon of CSS/JavaScript or you can find a plugin that will do the work for you. Plugins include integration with Bootstrap, jQuery, Yeoman and much more.

The Documentation section is actually a wiki, which can be modified by any logged in user. It has an official manual, tutorials, screencasts, a sample app and much more. If that does not do it for you, then there are countless third-party tutorials, more than 12k questions on SO and much much more

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.