Fast-track your Web application development by harnessing the power of the Yii PHP framework

Overview of Agile Web Application Development with Yii1.1 and PHP5

• A step-by-step guide to creating a modern, sophisticated web application using an incremental and iterative approach to software development
• Build a real-world, user-based, database-driven project task management application using the Yii development framework
• Take a test-driven design (TDD) approach to software development utilizing the Yii testing framework
• Write less code by using Yii's application generation and scaffolding tools
• Enhance your application by adding Web feeds, adapting it to multiple languages, and by utilizing themes to provide beautiful skins and design flexibility

In Detail

This book is a step by step tutorial in developing a real-world application using the incremental and iterative approach to software development. You learn about agile software development by leaning on the agile nature of the Yii application development framework. You touch on each aspect of the software development lifecycle by building a project task management application from concept through production deployment.

After a brief, general introduction to the Yii framework and outlining the software development approach taken throughout the book, the chapters break down in the same way as software development iterations do in real-world projects. After the 1st iteration, you will have a working and tested application with a valid, tested connection to a database.

In the 2nd and 3rd iterations, we flesh out our main database entities and domain object model and become familiar with Yii's object-relational-mapping (ORM) layer, Active Record. We also learn how to lean on Yii's auto-generation tools to automatically build our create/read/update/delete (CRUD) functionality against our newly created model. These iterations also focus on how Yii's form validation and submission model works. By the end of the third iteration you will have a working application that allows you to mange projects and issues (tasks) within those projects.

The 4th and 5th iterations are dedicated to user management. We learn about the built-in authentication model within Yii to assist in application login and logout functionality. We then dive into the authorization model, first taking advantage of a Yii's simple access control model, then implementing the more sophisticated role-based access control (RBAC) framework that Yii provides.

By the end of the 5th iteration, all of the basics of a task management application are in place. The next several iterations are focused on the nice-to-haves. We add user comment functionality, introducing a reusable content portlet architecture approach in the process. We add in an RSS Web feed and demonstrate how easy it is to integrate other third-party tools within a Yii application. We take advantage of Yii's theming structure to help streamline and design the application, and then introduce Yii's internationalization (I18N) features so the application can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes.

Finally, we turn our focus to production deployment. We introduce ways to optimize performance and security to prepare the application for a real-world production environment.

Learn the Yii development framework by taking a test-driven, incremental, and iterative approach to building a real-world task management application

What you will learn from this book

• Take a "test first" approach to software development using the Yii testing framework
• Auto-generate skeleton web applications as well as CRUD scaffolding for the domain object model using the built-in command-line interface
• Create user-based applications with Yii's authentication model
• Enhance your user-based application to control a user's access to feature functionality
• Write an administrative console application to extend the features provided by Yii's powerful command-line tools
• Integrate other frameworks and libraries into a Yii application to further extend its feature set
• Spend less time managing application configuration by taking advantage of Yii's sensible defaults and conventions.
• Learn how easy it is to implement a multi-user application by utilizing Yii's authentication and role-based authorization models
• Update your code to properly mange the user's last login time and store it in the database
• Achieve pre- and post-action method request processing using controller filters
• Tap into the CActiveRecord validation workflow to allow for pre- and post-validation processing of your model data
• Greatly increase re-use, consistency, and ease of maintenance of the application by developing small content blocks called portlets
• Make your application accessible to the world with internationalization (l18N) features and enhance the looks of your application using the Yii theming model

Approach

This is a step-by-step tutorial for developing web applications using Yii. This book follows the test-first, incremental, and iterative approach to software development while developing a project task management application called "TrackStar".

Who this book is written for

If you are a PHP programmer with knowledge of object oriented programming and want to rapidly develop modern, sophisticated web applications, then this book is for you. No prior knowledge of Yii is required to read this book.