When comparing Yii vs Revel, the Slant community recommends Yii for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?” Yii is ranked 21st while Revel is ranked 38th. 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 Comes bundled with a code reload tool
Revel comes bundled with a code reload tool which rebuilds the project on every file change. This code reload tool is also used to run, build and deploy the Revel application that you are building.
Pro Good examples easy to understand with simple emulated MVC behavior
Pro No need to find and install external libraries
Revel is a "batteries included" web framework, which means that a lot of features already come out of the box. This way you don't have to spend time and find third-party libraries to integrate to the framework for most of the tasks you need to complete.
Pro Easy to learn for fast development
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 Non-idiomatic code
Con Outdated
The world has moved past its MVC obsession. It's not the way the web works anymore. The good thing about go is that it's trivial to write a server applications (literally takes minutes). relying on a bloated, archaic framework is missing the point
Con Dead
Thankfully, this abomination is no longer being developed
Con No official support for mongo
Revel does not come with any support for MongoDB, you can integrate third-party libraries but they have been reported to crash under heavy load.