So, I’ve been on the lookout for a good Framework in PHP that I can rely on for whenever I need to build a website rapidly. I’ve so far tried the following frameworks:

• CakePHP
• CodeIgniter
• Zend

To find more, please visit: PHP Frameworks.

When I was browsing PHP Frameworks site months ago, I came across a framework named Yii that promised that it was the fastest PHP framework. I’ve got intrigued and checked out its features and quite surprised to find that it has excellent features while being high performing and less resource hungry. The following are some of it’s key features:

• Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern: Yii adopts this proven technique in Web programming which can better separate logic from presentation.
• Database Access Objects (DAO) and Active Record: Yii allows developers to model database data in terms of objects and save their effort of writing long and repetitive SQL statements.
• Integration with jQuery: as one of the most popular JavaScript framework, jQuery enables writing highly efficient and versatile JavaScript interfaces.
• Form input and validation: Yii makes collecting form input extremely easy and safe. Yii comes with a set of validators which can be used to ensure validity of input data, and it also has helper methods and widgets to indicate errors when validation fails.
• Web 2.0 widgets: powered by jQuery, Yii comes with a set of Web 2.0 widgets, such as auto-complete input field, treeview, and so on.
• Authentication and authorization: Yii has built-in authentication support. It also supports authorization via hierarchical role-based access control (RBAC).
• Theming: it enables change of the outlook of an Yii application instantly.
• Web services: Yii supports automatic generation of complex WSDL service specifications and management of Web service request handling.
• Internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N): Yii supports message translation, date and time formatting, number formatting, and interface localization.
• Layered caching scheme: Yii supports data caching, page caching, fragment caching and dynamic content. The storage medium of caching can be changed easily without touching the application code.
• Error handling and logging: errors are handled and presented more nicely, and log messages can be categorized, filtered and routed to different destinations.
• Security: Yii is equipped with many security measures to help secure Web applications to prevent cyber attacks. These measures include cross-site scripting (XSS) prevention, cross-site request forgery (CSRF) prevention, cookie tampering prevention, etc.
• Compliance to XHTML: Code generated by Yii components and command line tools complies to the XHTML standard.
• Automatic code generation: Yii provides the tools that can automatically generate the code that you need, such as a skeleton application, CRUD applications, etc.
• Purely object-oriented: Yii framework sticks to strict OOP paradigm. It does not define any global function or variable. And the class hierarchy that it defines allows maximum reusability and customization.
• Friendly with third-party code: Yii is carefully designed to work well with third-party code. For example, you can use code from PEAR or Zend Framework in your Yii application.
• Detailed documentation: every single method or property is clearly documented. A comprehensive tutorial is also provided together with other minor tutorials.
• Extension library: Yii provides an extension library consisting of user-contributed components. This makes the above feature list never ending.

Go ahead and check it out now…

1. Microsoft Visual Studio – SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop
2. Web Development IDEs – Eclipse, Aptana
3. Microsoft .NET Framework – Mono
4. Microsoft SQL Server – MySQL, PostgreSQL, FireBird
5. Microsoft Project – OpenProj, Open Workbench
6. Microsoft Visio – Dia, StarUML
7. Microsoft Publisher – Scribus
8. Microsoft Office – OpenOffice
9. Microsoft Office Outlook/Outlook Express – Evolution / Mozilla Thunderbird
10. Microsoft Exchange Server – Zimbra, OpenXchange
11. Microsoft SharePoint – Alfresco, Deki Wiki, DotNetNuke, PHPNuke
12. Mercury LoadRunner – OpenSTA
13. Adobe Flash – OpenLaszlo
14. Adobe Acrobat – PDFCreator
15. Adobe Photoshop – Paint.NET, CinePaint, GIMP, GIMPShop
16. Adobe Illustrator – Inkspace
17. Adobe Premier/After Effects – Avidemux / Jahshaka
18. BusinessObjects Crystal Reports – JasperReports, DataVision, OpenRPT
19. Microsoft Dynamics – SugarCRM
20. Microsoft Money / Quicken – GNUCash, Grisbi
21. MindManager – FreeMind
22. WinZip – 7zip
23. Beyond Compare (File/Directory) Comparison – WinMerge
24. CodeSmith (Easy Code Generator) – MyGeneration
25. Icon Editor – IcoFX
26. FTP Client – FileZilla

There are much more than this list is available. But this is a start to remove on famous proprietary software from your arsenal.

It has fantastic User Interface entirely developed using the JavaScript Framework MooTools and some more stuff collectively known as Mocha UI. It’s released under MIT license and is freely available from the site mentioned above to download and use.

They’ve hosted a Visually Appealing Demo to test the capabilities of Mocha UI which is quite a head turner.

Next time you consider Adobe Flex, consider something much lighter like this.

As my previous post on SharpDevelop explained, SharpDevelop in many ways a better alternative to Visual Studio. However, the significant differences between these two and the advantages or disadvantages over each other are explained here.

Advantages of SharpDevelop over Visual Studio:

1. Open Source (Full Source Code available freely)
2. Completely Free to use for both Commercial and Personal use
3. Supports all .NET Framework, Compact Framework, WinForms (with excellent extra GTK# for X-Window based systems), Console Application, Direct3D (wow, Game Development anyone?), WPF, and Windows and Web Services.
4. Supports additional languages like Boo, F#, ILAsm and Python (very good)  out of box apart from C# and VB.NET.
5. Supports Installer Creation (a very likable feature works better than VS in my opinion)
6. Light on Resources and faster on Building (refer Point 8 below). The last time I checked, has only 80 KB of RAM with 0.x% CPU Usage even after opening a bulky WinForms project and keeping couple of forms open in design mode. (A relief from VS’s usual 128 KB or more RAM and 4-5% CPU Usage)
7. Inbuilt Re-factoring Engine (you’ll need the paid software JetBrains ReSharper if you want this in Visual Studio)
8. Parallel Build support for Multi-core machines (faster building, very likable feature which is sadly not available in VS as of 2005)
9. Supports important Visual Studio add-ons like FxCop, StyleCop, NUnit, PartCover etc.
10. Version Controlling with Subversion (which is far better a solution than VSS. I’ll post another post soon explaining the benefits of SVN over VSS. You can of course use AnkhSVN to get this in Visual Studio though.)
11. Wide range of very useful Add-ons (as the case with most Open Source projects)
12. Inbuilt Documentation Generator (Sandcastle, SHFB)
13. Very likable Class Diagram and Code Coverage views
14. Very likable F# Interactive, Boo Interpreter and Python Console
15. Supports Mono (the alternative .NET 2.0 Framework for Linux, BSD and Mac OS X)

What I see as disadvantages of SharpDevelop:

1. Code Editor has some minor glitches (I’ve seen some glitches on code folding and unfolding though it’s just visual not physical)
2. Lack of VSS Support (though I’m not looking forward to it as it’s a proprietary version control system to be included in any open source project like this)
3. Lack of Visual Studio like Object Browser (I miss that one here, though #Develop has very good Class Browser)
4. Somewhat Buggy (I’ve seen it crashing sometimes but understandable due to its Open Source nature)

But apart from this, programmatically speaking, you can do everything that you can do in VS with #Develop. It’s pretty impressive for a Open Source project.

Now, you can shed all your worries of that and embrace the open source community for making a powerful Open Source IDE named SharpDevelop. It was so powerful that you can seriously consider it for a complete drop-in replacement of Microsoft Visual Studio. It supports almost all of the Visual Studio features and much more. It supports Subversion for Version Control. In my opinion Subversion is far great an Version Control system than VSS. Here is the screen shot of how it looks: