Yii is a free, open source web application development framework, written in PHP5, that promotes clean DRY design and encourages rapid development. It works to streamline your application development time and helps to ensure an extremely efficient, extensible, and maintainable end product. Being extremely performance-optimized, Yii is a perfect choice for any size project. However, it has been built with sophisticated, enterprise applications in mind. You have full control over the configuration from head-to-toe (presentation-to-persistence) to conform to your enterprise development guidelines. It comes packaged with tools to help test and debug your application, and has clear and comprehensive documentation.
This book is a collection of Yii2 recipes. Each recipe is represented as a full and independent item, which showcases solutions from real web applications. So you can easily reproduce them in your environment and learn Yii2 fast and without tears. All recipes are explained with step-by-step code examples and clear screenshots. Yii2 is like a suit that looks great off the rack, but is also very easy to tailor to fit your needs. Virtually every component of the framework is extensible. This book will show how to use official extensions, extend any component, or write a new one.
This book will help you create modern web applications quickly, and make sure they perform well using examples and business logic from real life. You will deal with the Yii command line, migrations, and assets. You will learn about role-based access, security, and deployment. We'll show you how to easily get started, configure your environment, and be ready to write web applications efficiently and quickly.
Chapter 1, Fundamentals, covers how to install the Yii Framework and different ways to install it. We will introduce you to application templates: basic and advanced and what is difference between them. Then you will learn about dependency injection container. This chapter contains info about model events, which are triggered after some simple actions such as model saving and updating and another. We will learn how to use external code which will include ZendFramework, Laravel, and Sympony in examples. We will also learn how to update your yii-1.x.x based application to yii2 step-by-step. A few more recipes are available at https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/4270OS_Chapter1.pdf.
Chapter 2, Routing, Controllers, and Views, teaches some handy things about the Yii URL router, controllers, and views. You will be able to make your controllers and views more flexible.
Chapter 3, ActiveRecord, Model, and Database, discusses the three main methods to work with databases in Yii: Active Record, query builder, and direct SQL queries through DAO. All three are different in terms of syntax, features, and performance. In this chapter we will learn how to work with the database efficiently, when to use models and when not to, how to work with multiple databases, how to automatically preprocess Active Record fields, and how to use powerful database criteria.
Chapter 4, Forms, covers how Yii makes working with forms a breeze and the documentation on it is almost complete. Still, there are some areas that need clarification and examples.
Chapter 5, Security, discusses how to keep your application secure according to the general web application security principle "filter input, escape output." We will cover topics such as creating your own controller filters, preventing XSS, CSRF, and SQL injections, escaping output, and using role-based access control.
Chapter 6, RESTful Web Services, covers how to write RESTful Web Services using Yii2 and built-in features.
Chapter 7, Official Extensions, explains us how to install and use official extensions in your project. You will learn how to write your own extension and share it for another developers.
Chapter 8, Extending Yii, covers not only how to implement your own Yii extension, but also how to make your extension reusable and useful for the community. In addition, we will focus on many things you should do in order to make your extension as efficient as possible.
Chapter 9, Performance Tuning, teaches some best practices of developing an application that will run smoothly until you have very high loads. Yii is one of the fastest frameworks out there. Still, when developing and deploying an application, it is good to have some extra performance for free, as well as following best practices for the application itself. In this chapter, we will see how to configure Yii to gain extra performance. In addition, we will learn some best practices for developing an application that will run smoothly until we have very high loads.
Chapter 10, Deployment, covers various tips, which are especially useful on application deployment and when developing an application in a team, or when you just want to make your development environment more comfortable.
Chapter 11, Testing, teaches us how to use the best technologies for testing such as Codeception, PhpUnit, Atoum, and Behat. You will be introduced how to write simple tests and how to avoid regression errors in your applicaiton.
Chapter 12, Debugging, Logging, and Error Handling, discusses review logging, analyzing the exception stack trace, and implementing our own error handler. It is not possible to create a bug-free application if it is relatively complex, so developers have to detect errors and deal with them as fast as possible. Yii has a good set of utility features to handle logging and handling errors. Moreover, in the debug mode, Yii gives you a stack trace if there is an error. Using it, you can fix errors faster.
In order to run the examples in this book, the following software will be required:
Web server
Database server
PHP
Yii2
This book is for developers with good PHP5 knowledge and MVC-frameworks who have tried to develop applications using the Yii 1.x.x version. This book will be very useful for all those who would like to try Yii2, or those who are afraid to move from Yii 1.x.x. to Yii2. If you have still not tried Yii2, this book is definitely for you!
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it..., How it works..., There's more..., and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "we are defining an alias parameter that should be specified in the URL after /page/."
A block of code is set as follows:
'urlManager' => array(
'enablePrettyUrl' => true,
'showScriptName' => false,
),When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
'urlManager' => array( 'enablePrettyUrl' => true, 'showScriptName' => false, ),
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
./yii migrate up
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Generate a Post model using Gii with an enabled Generate ActiveQuery option that generates the PostQuery class."
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