Advice Needed For Project Startup

Hi guys,

I am really confused and would be really thankful if someone could guide me in the right direction. ???

I am starting a new project and it will be my first big PHP project. I have no clue about YII, ZEND or the frontend frameworks mentioned below, but I have a good oop programming background and some php/html experience. I’d love to use this opportunity to learn the up-to-date technologies for building great web-apps.

THE PROJECT

The project I am currently wireframing is supposed to be a slick desktop-style webapp for product and invoice manamgent. I’d like to have a really slick up to date user interface. I can already see that standard-YII does not provide all the frontend features I need.

OPTIONS PHP FRAMEWORK

For the PHP framework I am currently looking at YII and ZEND. Both frameworks I have NOT worked with yet. I have read the "The Definitive Guide to Yii i" and would prefer to go with YII with ActiveRecord as it looks slicker than ZEND to mee. :slight_smile:

OPTIONS FRONTEND AJAX FRAMEWORK

My biggest concern right now is finding the right frontend framework, as the project needs to have good ajax functionality, for example:

  • a table grid with good filter-support for the end-user (for example date-ranges, usage of multiple filters at one, filter-presets)

  • a table grid with ajax support for "add-new row-data"

  • multitab ajax forms

  • Modal Window Forms etc.

Yiibooster looks like a great YII addon, but is lagging the above features and it seems to have some performance problems. (UPDATE: This seems to be wrong and only happens in development/debug-mode - please have a look at: http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/yiibooster/#hh4)

YUI, jquerygrid, dojo and kendo seem to NOT be supported by YII. Is that right?

Summerized in my sweetest dreams I’d like to have a “Twitter-Bootstrap-Look” with “YUI frontend functionality” and “YII backend functionality”. :rolleyes:

As I said: I am confused… :slight_smile:

MY QUESTION

What combination of PHP & AJAX frontend framework would you recon me to go for?

I don’t want to limit myself to YII only - If there is something really good for the ZEND framework then I will have to go with ZEND - though i would like to use YII… so what is really good for YII?

what do you guys recon?

I would be really thankful for your advice!

Kind regards

Mikey

Odd, I’ve read more than once that YiiBooster is laggy/slow. I don’t use it myself but have used the original extension on which it is based extensively, with no performance issues.

Try this: http://www.cniska.net/yii-bootstrap/

If its slow try disabling debug mode.

Not everything you read on the internet is true.

Yii doesn’t impose any frontend framework on you. You are totally free to choose whatever frontend you want.

Can you explain this a bit more? What does this mean for a Word Press front end? Would it require an extension or ???

Yiibooster Speed

Concerning the mentioned "speed problems" of Yiibooster I can only say, that I can NOT CONFIRM it as I only read some rumors about it in the massive "Yiibooster Topic" of this forum. I have not tried Yiibooster myself.

Can someone confirm that Yiibooster’s speed is acceptable for a middle scale application with around 20.000 datasets spread over 10 tables? I might have a “product table” with 10.000 records. Will Yiibooster Table Grid be able to handle this?

Other Frontend Javascript Frameworks?

It would be really cool if some more developers could give some hints with what kind of YII-compatible frontend frameworks they have a good experience.

How about YUI or jQuery UI? Did someone manage to get them running with YII?

I think what you need to get through your head is that Yii doesn’t care what front-end framework you use.

If you want to use Yii’s grids and stuff you need jquery / jqueryUI perhaps. But please understand that at the core it is just about grabbing stuff off the database and presenting it. You don’t even need to render views with Yii - you could use a JS framework and just use Yii to return JSON.

Please read what I wrote. If you have DEBUG mode on, YiiBooster is slow because it refreshes assets on each page load. It does this for your convenience while developing. Its plenty fast in production with cached css and javascript.

I can confirm what has been written before: YiiBooster is perfectly fine in reagrds of speed when debug mode has been disabled.

If you really want a thick (and I mean THICK) frontend, consider spending some money on Ext4yii, which is a wrapper for the ExtJS library. From the sounds of it, it’s got everything you want plus a lot more.

Post Scriptum: I forgot to mention, be careful with what you use within yii bootstrap. Some of the functionality might pull in highcharts. This is fine as long as you are developing a free app. But if you are going commercial, you’ll need to purchase a license.

And for YiiBooster: do you really think that YiiBooster is slow and/or badly written?

Take a look who’s behind the company maintaining it.

On the Internet, there’s no end to what people manage to get wrong. ;)

I don’t know of any framework which copes with bad code.

Of course it can.

10,000 records at once? Of course not. Nothing can. Paged?

Yes. It can handle trillions of records if they are paged results. :)

(And by paged I mean using LIMIT)

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Take a look at the front page of the Yii site - there are some really great hints concerning jQuery UI (Take a peek at the featured slider)

jQuery UI is the most widely used ‘UI’, but you need to understand that you can do whatever you want with Yii: it’s plain PHP.

Yiibooster Speed

I never ment to criticice Yiibooster. Right now it looks like this is the best open-source frontend framework available for YII and it will be the one I will have a look at first.

For all other guys being in the same situation like me - Yiibooster does NOT seem to have speed problems. It is a great framework and needs to be supported!! Have a look here concerning development/debug-mode: http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/yiibooster/#hh4

Ext4Yii looks good, but it is not open-source. In fact is is ion-cubed which totally goes agains my strategie as I always want to have the ability to adapt the frameworks I need to my needs (which is not possible with ioncubed apps).

[b]

I think we all should support Yiibooster! :-)[/b]

Well, you haven’t mentioned those requirements in your original post, so I took the liberty of ignoring them ;)

Good luck with YiiBooster. I think it’s only some jQuery-foo away from the functionality you’re mising.

This reminds of my other job as a moderator at Ogre3d.org since 2005…

People ask all the time: can Ogre handle 40.000 polygons? Why is Ogre so slow?

And the answers are: yes, provided that you handle the scene properly. And, you didn’t by chance compile Ogre in debug mode?

I didn’t mean to imply that you’ve got anything against YiiBooster. I know you don’t.

And, judging from the many comments floating around about performance, I don’t blame you for getting the impression that the extension is slow.

However, I also know this: the guys behind it know their Yii foo.

They better should. Given that their names are all well-known in the Yii community through Yii core code contributions and the supply with countless extensions ::) ;) B)