Yii Application Development Cookbook - Third Edition

Key Features

• Learn how to use Yii2 efficiently through clear examples and core features, and see how to use tests, create reusable code snippets, core widgets, deployment, and more
• This book provides you with a wide space for practice approaches and helps you to learn about the new Yii2 framework.
• Understand the difference between the Yii 1.x.x versions using useful examples from real web applications

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• See the new version of the Yii2 framework and application development practices
• Write your applications more efficiently using shortcuts, Yii’s core functionality, and the best practices in Web 2.0
• Get data from a database, and deal with Active Record, migrations, widgets, and core features
• Easily update your skills from the previous version of the framework
• Explore how to use Yii with different JavaScript frameworks and libraries such as WebSockets, Angular, Ember, Backbone and React
• Learn how to keep your application secure according to the general web application security principle "filter input, escape output.
• Write RESTfull Web Services using Yii2 and built-in features
• Correctly install and use official extensions in your projects
• Effectively create and implement your own Yii extension, and also ensure your extension is reusable and useful for the community

About the Author

Andrew Bogdanov is a seasoned web developer from Yekaterinburg, Russia with more than six years of experience in industrial development. Since 2010 he has been interested in Yii and MVC frameworks. He has taken part in projects written in Yii such as a work aggregator for a UK company, high-load projects, real-estate projects, and development of private projects for the government.

He has worked on various CMS and frameworks using PHP and MySQL, which includes Yii, Kohana, Symphony, Joomla, WordPress, CakePHP, and so on. Also, having good hands in integrating third-party APIs such as Payment gateways (Paypal, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn), he is very good in slicing and frontend. So he can provide full information about Yii framework.

He is also well-versed in PHP/MYSQL, Yii 1.x.x, Yii 2.x.x, Ajax, JQuery, MVC frameworks, Python, LAMP, HTML/CSS, Mercurial, Git, AngularJs, and adaptive markup. You can also visit his blog http://jehkinen.com.

In his free time he likes to visit and talk with new people and discuss web development problems. He is currently working with professionals http://2amigos.us.

Dmitry Eliseev has been a web developer since 2008 and specializes in server-side programming on PHP and PHP frameworks.

Since 2012 he has authored his personal blog, http://elisdn.ru, about web development in general and about the Yii Framework particularly. His blog became a well-known resource in the Russian Yii community. He is an active member of a Russian-language forum http://yiiframework.ru.

Dmitry is interested in developmental best practices, software architectures, object-oriented programming, and other approaches.

He is an author and a presenter of practical courses about principles and best practices of object oriented programming and the use of version control systems. And also he is an author of webinars, the Yii2 Framework, and common developmental subjects. He practices teaching and counseling by development on frameworks and using of principles of software design and improvements of common code quality. This is his first book.

Alexander Makarov is an experienced engineer from Russia and has been a Yii framework core team member since 2010. Before joining the Yii core team, he participated in the CodeIgniter community growth in Russia. In 2009, he finished the Russian translation of the framework documentation and created the Russian community website. In 2012, he released the Russian version of the book along with Russian community members. In the same year, he was the technical reviewer for three more books:

• The Yii Book: Developing Web Applications Using the Yii PHP Framework, Larry Ullman
• Web Application Development with Yii and PHP, Jeff Winesett
• Yii Rapid Application Development Hotshot, Lauren O'Meara and James Hamilton

In his free time, Alexander writes technical blog at http://rmcreative.ru/, speaks at conferences, and enjoys movies, music, traveling, photography, and languages. He currently resides in Voronezh, Russia with his beloved wife and daughter.

Table of Contents

1. Fundamentals
2. Routing, Controllers, and Views
3. ActiveRecord, Model, and Database
4. Forms
5. Security
6. RESTful Web Services
7. Official Extensions
8. Extending Yii
9. Performance Tuning
10. Deployment
11. Testing
12. Debugging, Logging, and Error Handling