Yii2 VS Slim

Yii is one of the oldest PHP frameworks, acronym as Yes It Is! It has 14.2k stars and 7k forks on GitHub. It is a fast, secure, and flexible PHP framework for web development, especially for building MVC architecture websites. It is an Object-Oriented PHP framework that requires knowledge of inheritance, polymorphism, etc.

In Yii Framework we have a middleware that will allow us to access our applications without the need to point the web server to the public directory of each template, so we will use the middleware SubFolder::class.

asset-packagist: This is the traditional Yii2 way, here we will add the following to our composer.json.

It is often preferable to manage Yii Assets programmatically. For example, when you use the widget in a page, it will automatically include the required css and javascript files, instead of asking you to manually find these files and include them. And when you upgrade the widget to a new version, it will automatically use the new version of the Yii Assets. In this tutorial, we will describe the powerful Yii Assets management capability provided in Yii Framework .

As we can see in the example above, we have defined the configuration of our packages in files .php (it doesn’t matter if they are YiiFramework packages or not), this allows us to define the configuration of each component in a very simple way to understand.

Now if we want to create an extension, under the code standard used in the Yii Framework v.3 packages, we can use yiisoft/template, provides us the tools necessary for our code to comply with good coding standards they are:

Now we understand how to do any configuration of any YiiFramework package or external, it is not necessary to have a single long and complex configuration file, we can organize it according to the group of configurations and Yii config will do the work for you, as well as the container it applies the definitions for you, with the automatic wiring facility in controllers, which makes it easy to access any container dependency without the need to use static access to it, or depend on the container itself.

Currently Laravel is the "go to" for new PHP applications to mostly developers today, if not, plain PHP, Slim, Symfony and other frameworks does the job, but for Wordpress, custom PHP boilerplates or/and outdated PHP patterns (aka, single ton) is what we have for work in mostly cases, if not, hacky ways to integrate frameworks as Laravel itself or parts of it to leverage a better code structure.

Slim is a micro PHP framework used for web development with 11.7k stars and 2k forks on GitHub. It has a simple and intuitive API development process. It is a micro-framework, meaning you only get a minimum of support for HTTP requests and forwarding requests to appropriate controllers. So the question is, why should you choose a micro-framework? Because it offers you flexibility and high extensibility.

Slim 4, a minimalistic PHP micro-framework, offers middleware support to easily add CORS headers. Middleware in Slim acts like a series of layers through which your app sends a request. One such layer can be responsible for adding CORS headers.

SlimPHP 3 Skeleton app shows this as well: https://github.com/slimphp/Slim-Skeleton/blob/3.1.8/public/index.php

How hard did you look? There are plenty out there. FastRoute, Phroute, based on FastRoute, with basic middleware, League/Route - routing with middleware, using FastRoute, PSR 7 & 15, Slim Framework, at it's core, it like League/Route, etc. None of these require a full framework to use.

You can have the container call in a config folder with a file called dependencies or how ever you want. A few existing examples of this is here - Slim calls this app/dependencies in this skeleton project and Odan's Skeleton has this as config/container in their project.

Maybe use this if you don't like to dive into bigger frameworks: https://www.slimframework.com/