Yii vs Fat-Free Framework

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.

The framework is very lightweight and fast. Even though it's pretty light, it still does not lose a lot of functionality.

Building an application that processes a URL (display a page, submit a form, invoke Ajax, etc.) requires very little code and can be achieved very quickly. Allows developers to focus on the application itself and not the plumbing.

After you download the framework it is very simple to get an app up and running very quickly. Makes it easy for newer PHP and web app developers to start using a MVC framework.

You know those frameworks that have updated 5 times during your own development phase? Well, F3 sees one or two updates per year. Never had any issues updating or upgrading. F3 just works.

Virtually everything is modular. You can choose which modules and libraries to include and to keep the framework as lightweight as possible.

Freedom to structure your projects' directories and codes as you wish.

F3 is a non-opinionated framework : you are entirely free to use the files/API/assets structure that you love.

Following a minimalistic approach, F3 tends to avoid adding code and structure that are not strictly necessary, while focusing on what really matters : coding your solution; actually you learn F3 while implementing/coding your project/webapp

Default view engine is superb and can also work with varieties of PHP view engines including Twig.

The community is responsive and helpful in clarifying the aspects of the framework.

The time to go from knowing nothing about Fat-Free to getting a project completed is very reduced compared to other bulky frameworks.

Concise and to the point documentation. Includes many examples and complete API reference.

You download a zip file and use it by placing require(); statement. No need to use composer, curl or any dependency injector which sometime become a great pain.

In a framework that's so small, it puts the rest to shame.

With many examples which are easy to follow by new users.