After using Eclipse for a while I switched to Netbeans IDE for Yii development. It seems faster and easier to setup. Following is my experience of setting up the development environment.
Create a project stub using the following command -
>> yii-1.1.3.r2247\framework\yiic webapp mytestapp
Open Netbeans IDE and proceed with the following steps -
1. Click on File-> New Project
This will open up a dialog box. Select "PHP" under "Categories" and under "Projects" select "PHP Applications with Existing Sources".
Click Next.
2. In the "Sources Folder", input the path of "mytestapp" folder on your machine.
Assign a project name. "mytestapp" for my case.
Select a PHP version.
Click Next
3. The options in this form should be set up automatically like below.
Click Finish
This should set up your Yii project in Netbeans IDE.
4. Go to "Debug" menu on the top bar on Netbeans IDE. Select "Debug Project(mytestapp)" and you should be able to debug your project.
5. "Continue(F5)" option in Debug can be used to resume a stopped debug session.