Doublehops

I have been building an API with Yii2 for the last four months and and I’m really enjoying it. The developers of Yii have done a tremendous job putting together a framework that makes building applications both fun and fast. The API is to be used by iOS and Android apps as well as a web app (Angular JS) to facilitate phone calls and messages, among other things.

Many of Yii’s strengths come from the clever and well thought-out design that makes common tasks incredibly easy to implement and more complex tasks easy to build whilst keeping the code and structure of your application clean. Some of my favourite attributes to see are:

RESTful services

Building a RESTful service is incredibly quick to build by calling the inbuilt scaffolding tool. It will read the database table to build the model, and also views if you’re building a traditional website. Then with just a few changes in the controller you can start creating, reading, updating and deleting records through your browser.

Behaviours

Attaching a behaviour to a component or controller is similar to extending a class but gives you more control and can act on events. Yii2 has a collection of behaviours that are built in but allows you to create your own. Two built-in behaviors that I’m using are Authenticator and CORS.

Authenticator behaviour: This behaviour allows you to easily implement common authentication models such as HTTP Basic Auth and OAuth. But I was able to add a custom authentication module to the auth behaviour to meet our unique rrequirements.

CORS behaviour: CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) is a standard that allows browsers to make Javascript requests to servers that the Javascript files themselves weren’t server from. This is generally not possible due to security issues. CORS can be quite complicated and can cause major headaches but Yii2 allows you to simply include the behaviour to a controller and the API will respond with the required headers to each CORS request from the browser.

Custom authentication

Yii2 has a great solution for Authentication and has the common ones, such as OAuth and Basic Http Auth built in. But it also quite simple to add your own authentication if need be. The requirements for us was to allow each user to connect to the API with multiple devices. Therefore each device is required to send its individual token for each request made to the API. Yii2 makes this quite trivial.

Testing

Yii makes it easy to use use test databases and environment variables which makes testing easy. My solution was to setup an alias domain (env.myapi.test) for each environment. When Yii receives a request on a domain ending with .test it will use test variables and database to run my tests and not pollute the dev or prod data with test data. Every API endpoint is tested and it’s very reassuring watching the tests that you have not broken any endpoints when new features are added.