When comparing Yesod vs Yii, the Slant community recommends Yesod for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Yesod is ranked 12th while Yii is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Yesod is:
While not required, Yesod offers templating through a Shakespearean family of languages to produce page code.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Offers templating for type-safe, well-formed content
While not required, Yesod offers templating through a Shakespearean family of languages to produce page code.
Pro Uses type-safe URLs
Ensures that data provided by the URL is type-safe. This means that data in the URL has a definitive type.
Pro Can be used without knowing much Haskell
While Yesod is written in Haskell, developers can achieve basic functionality without much investment in the language.
Pro Rapid development through code scaffolding
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.
Pro Comes with important security standarts
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
Pro Highly extensible
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 . '"' : '';
}
}
Pro Integrated with a testing framework
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.
Pro Lots of plugins available
Yii has about 2000 addons hosted on Yii's official website. These addons significantly decrease development time and increase the developer's efficiency.
Pro License
Yii is free and open source and is distributed under the BSD License.
Pro Strong community support
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.
Pro Easy to install
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.
Pro Best framework for CRUD operation
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.
Pro Highly extensible without effort
Cons
Con Is hard to customize
Learning how Yesod works internally is hard. It is a large framework with complicated components. Finding the appropriate code and understanding how it contributes to the framework is difficult, meaning developers will struggle.
Con Too much template haskell
You actually want to code in haskell and not some DSL with "magic" hidden under the bonnet.
Con Can be hard for beginners
Since Yii requires developers to write code following certain rules, or in other words, it requires developers to follow the "Yii way of doing things" it can be hard for beginners to warm up to it and start using it right away.
Con Not very good at many to many relations
(but there is a good plugin, namely CAdvancedArBehavior extension to do this)