Being redesigned and rebuilt based on success of Prado, a ASP.NET like framework, Yii inherits well designed core components and utilize flexibility of PHP.

Proven to be the fastest PHP framework, Yii helps its authors earn the second title (not official of course), beside their Prado fastest PHP web development framework.

I’ve been with Prado since 2006 and many websites build by my company are Prado based. Prado is a event driven, component based framework in which, everything should be wrapped as a component for reuse purpose, ease of usage, simple configuration and distribution.

However, share the common with many big names, Prado proved to be slow like Zend framework or Symfony. It’s also not easy for Prado to be widely used as its architect is very similar to ASP.NET, not the MVC model that PHP and Java developers be familiar with.

Yii is built with those lessons in mind (well, I guess ). Come back to MVC model, in general Yii is very similar to CodeIgniter or CakePHP. Yii Actions, Views and Controllers are almost the same but its also keep what are proven to be good in Prado, the component and controls.

A Yii control is called a widget clearly defined as a data presentation. For many MVC coders, this will help while programming and we can easily mix business processing and data presenting code together.

A Yii component is called an extension. Extensions are encapsulated so it is simple for coders to distribute their work among community.

With powerful core component for database management, form processing, extension and widget structure Yii empowers developers to develop mid-size web application. Yii 1.0.3 also come with module support so large scale web application can be divided into modules.