Yii vs FeathersJS
When comparing Yii vs FeathersJS, the Slant community recommends Yii for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Yii is ranked 21st while FeathersJS is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose Yii is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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
Pro Can sync events between different Node instances
Feather can sync events happening in two different Node processes or even servers in real-time. For example: an event happens in server A, the user connected to server B is instantly notified of that event.
This is done through a central Redis or Mongo collection or through a websocket libraries' clustering library.
Pro Easy REST APIs
Through services, Feathers provides instant CRUD functionality, it also can easily expose a RESTful and real-time API through HTTP/HTTPS and websockets.
Pro Can be integrated in an existing ExpressJS project
Since Feathers itself is built on top of Express (it's a thin wrapper over socket.io, primus and Express) and because of Feathers' highly modular nature, it's very easy to integrate Feathers in an existing Express project.
Pro Plug-in any feature you need
Feathers makes extensive use of modules (which are called Feathers services). These services work like ExpressJS middleware and can be used with app.use('/path', serviceObject)
.
Services help developers keep their applications modular and as minimal as possible, without any unnecessary libraries or bloat.
Pro Support for different socket transports
FeatherJS uses primus which is a universal wrapper for real-time frameworks. Through primus you can easily choose which socket transport you want to use.
Cons
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)
Con Not so widely used
Could be problematic to convince the client use this framework in his/her project.
Con Not very beginner friendly
Although the documentation for Feathers is very good, it still needs some configuration in order to get Feathers up for developing something with it.