Yii and Phalcon – A comparative study

Introduction
In this blog, I present an in-depth, comparative analysis between two top MVC frameworks, YII and Phalcon for PHP. Factors like performance, ease, database handling, ORM and more, have been used to rate them. The intention behind this exercise is to give you a basic picture of ‘Why we choose MVCs for development, and what are the benefits arising from it’. The results are based on both online sources, and my many, day to day experiences at Suyati.
The basics

Yii	Phalcon
Yii is a high-performance PHP framework. It is well known for its key features: Fast, secure and high-performance. It is a free and open-source web application development framework written in PHP5 that promotes clean, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) design and encourages rapid development.	Phalcon is an open source, full stack framework for PHP5, written as a C-extension, and optimized for high performance. Low-level optimizations provide the lowest overhead for MVC-based applications.

How they work

Yii	Phalcon
Yii is much faster, because it uses the lazy loading technique extensively. Going into details, it does not include a class file until the class is used for the first time, and it does not create an object until the object is accessed for the first time. Other frameworks suffer from a performance hit, because they enable functionality, irrespective of whether it is used during a request.	Components are loosely coupled. With Phalcon, nothing is imposed on you. It’s free to use as you glue components. It interacts with databases with maximum performance, by using a C-language ORM for PHP. Phalcon directly accesses internal PHP structures, optimizing execution in that way as well.

Performance comparison

Yii	Phalcon
Yii framework has a reputation for high-performance. It uses the lazy loading technique extensively. It has powerful caching support. And it is explicitly designed to work efficiently with AJAX.	Phalcon is an effort to build the fastest framework for PHP. We now have an even easier and robust way to develop applications with a framework implemented with the philosophy ‘Performance Really Matters’! The compiled nature of Phalcon offers extraordinary performance that outperforms all other frameworks measured in certain benchmarks.

Unit Testing

Yii	Phalcon
Yii testing framework is built on top of the PHPUnit. In Yii, the base class CTestCase is meant for generic unit tests, while CDbTestCase is suitable for testing active record model classes. Find more info: http://www.yiiframework.com/doc/guide/1.1/en/test.unit	You need to install PHPunit if not already done, using composer. The Phalcon incubator will help you build the unit tests. Find more info: http://docs.phalconphp.com/en/latest/reference/unit-testing.html

Yii V/s Phalcon – comprehensive comparison

Description/Feature	Yii	Phalcon
Multi-user system	Yes	Yes
Autofocus	Yes	Yes
Extension/Plug-in	Yes	Yes
Image processing engin	yes	?
Interpreter	Yes	?
Database	ˇ      MySQL	ˇ      MySQL
	ˇ      SQLite	ˇ      PostgreSQL
	ˇ      MSSQL	ˇ      SQLite
	ˇ      Oracle	ˇ      MongoDB
	ˇ      PostgreSQL	ˇ      Oracle
Trackback	Yes	?
Multilingual content	Yes	Yes
Database model	ˇ      Relational	ˇ      Relational
	ˇ      Object-oriented	ˇ      NoSQL
		ˇ      Object-oriented
Transactions	Yes	Yes
Unicode	Yes	Yes
Template language	ˇ      PHP	ˇ      Volt
	ˇ      Smarty	ˇ      PHP
	ˇ      Twig
Full text search	Yes	?
Scaffolding	Yes	Yes
Design pattern	ˇ      Active-Record	ˇ      Dependency injection
	ˇ      Model-View-Controller	ˇ      Model-View-Controller
	ˇ      DAO	ˇ      HMVC
	ˇ      HMVC
	ˇ      Observer
Development principles	ˇ      Convention over configuration	ˇ      Convention over configuration
	ˇ      Test-driven development	ˇ      Don’t repeat yourself
	ˇ      Don’t repeat yourself
Difficulty level	ˇ      Intermediate	ˇ      Beginner
		ˇ      Intermediate
Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)	Yes	Yes
Machine Code Generation	Yes	?
Documentation level	Very good	Very Good
RESTful	Yes	Yes
Code Generation	Yes	?
Free to use	Yes	Yes
Separate Service Layer	Yes	?
Web Flows	Yes	?
Community Driven	Good	Good
WSDL	Yes	?
Reliability	Very Good	?
API	Good	Good
Batch Processing	Yes	?
Cloud platform support	ˇ      Amazon EC2	ˇ      Amazon EC2
	ˇ      Amazon S3
	ˇ      digital ocean
	ˇ      ucloud biz
	ˇ      OpenShift
	ˇ      Windows Azure
	ˇ      Google App Engine
Admin Generator	Yes	?
Query Cache	Yes	?
Realtime	Yes	?
Data Security	Yes	?
Malicious Injection Prevention	Yes	Yes
Perfomance	Very Good	Very Good
Database migrations	Yes	Yes
Debug Mode	Yes	Yes
Unit Testing	Yes	Yes
Ajax	Yes	Yes
Extensions	1500+	?

Conclusion
It’s clear from my experience that Yii’s performance is excellent. It is easy to configure, use and manage projects in Yii. I am new to Phalcon and in fact Phalcon is a comparatively new framework. So its evaluations and review will not help much at this point. But Phalcon is sure to be a trendsetter in the coming days, because it has almost all the cool features of Yii – and Yii is that accepted.
Read More:
http://www.yiiframework.com
http://phalconphp.com/en/
? – As the framework is new, detailed reviews or feedback to rate it is not available.