Mastering Yii 2

It takes a lot of time to develop responsive and fancy page designs. The Twitter Bootstrap framework makes this job easy.

It is a difficult task to create good components on a page. However, you can use predeveloped Twitter Bootstrap components to make your pages more stylish.

To add dynamic features to your page, you need to know JavaScript very well and test your page carefully. However, when we use the Twitter Bootstrap JavaScript plugins, it takes a few minutes to get things done.

We can’t imagine complex web applications without a reliable access control system. With the Yii 2 framework components, we can develop reliable and clear access control systems easily.

Often, users need to submit some data to an application using forms. We should sanitize this data to prevent our web application from being hacked. Follow these steps to get things done.

Encryption and decryption algorithms are often used in complex websites. A lot of users trust significant data on websites. One way to keep our data secure is to encrypt and decrypt it when needed

Often, a web application generates the same data even if it is a time consuming operation. This may slow down our high loaded web application overload the server. However, cache features help us a lot to avoid the regeneration of the same data. We can do this easily with the help of the Yii 2 framework features.

In web development, we will sometimes need to cache not only custom data, but an entire user request as well. The Yii 2 framework has its own features to help us achieve this. Let’s use it now.

Complex web applications should send not only HTML files to visitors, but also JavaScript, CSS files, images, and so on. Such files increase server traffic and require a new HTTP request to send each file. If we combine and compress JavaScript and CSS files, this will help us to reduce server load, which is very desirable for high-loaded web applications.

PHP uses files to store user sessions by default. This is definitely enough for most of the sites. But if you develop high-loaded web application, session files may slow down your website. To resolve such problem, you need to store your users’ sessions in database. Fortunately, Yii 2 framework has these features for us.

A database is a great storage for sessions and cache, but it has one significant issue: each query to the database is time-consuming and may impact the performance of our high loaded web application. One of the solutions is to save cache and sessions in Memcached instead of database.

Memcached storage is very fast and can be shared between several servers, but it has a significant lacking: all your data may be lost on server failure. This is not a problem for cache, but sessions may contain important users’ information. Redis helps us to solve this problem.

A full text search in long strings is complex and a time consuming task. It is better to use the Sphinx software and related Yii 2 components for this purpose.

Elasticsearch is powerful and schema-free full text search engine. It has a RESTful API, so it is very clear to understand. Let’s use Elasticsearch with the related Yii 2 components.

MongoDB is NoSQL document-oriented database, but full text search is great feature of this storage, which gives us additional benefits, such as indexes, that are always up to date. This is important for frequently changing data.

If our web application is large and complex, it is difficult to check each page to see if it works appropriately. Codeception and Yii 2 related components will help us to do this job automatically.

The aim of unit testing is to check that everything works as expected even in the smallest piece of web application. We will write one test in this video.

Functional tests were created to test the functional parts of an application. You send a request to the application, receive the response, and then analyze it. These tests work similar to a visitor browsing a website. However, they may have access to technical details of your code as well.