Top 5 PHP Micro frameworks

If you have a small project and need specific features quickly, a micro-framework may be your best bet. Micro-frameworks have more flexibility and leave more decisions up to you. The PHP micro frameworks lack some of the advanced features and robust modules provided by various PHP full-stack frameworks. But these stripped-down frameworks help programmers to write small and simple web application in PHP efficiently and rapidly. Also, the developers can use micro-frameworks to test and deploy the PHP applications within a short amount of time. Each developer also has option to choose from a number of PHP micro-frameworks. So here we have listed Top 5 PHP Micro frameworks and Routers.

1. Lumen

The team behind Laravel developed Lumen. If you are familiar with Laravel, then Lumen provides an easy transition to micro-frameworks. Designed by Taylor Otwell in 2014, it allows you to use many Laravel components such as “middleware,” validation, caching and the Laravel service container.

2. Silex

Silex is a PHP microframework for PHP. It is built on the shoulders of Symfony and Pimple and also inspired by sinatra.
A microframework provides the guts for building simple single-file apps. Silex aims to be:

• Concise: Silex exposes an intuitive and concise API that
  is fun to use.
• Extensible: Silex has an extension system based around
  the Pimple micro service-container that makes it even easier to tie in
  third party libraries.
• Testable: Silex uses Symfony’s HttpKernel which
  abstracts request and response. This makes it very easy to test apps
  and the framework itself. It also respects the HTTP specification and
  encourages its proper use.

3. Slim

Slim is a PHP micro framework that helps you quickly write simple yet powerful web applications and APIs.It features a powerful router, simple request and response abstractions, plenty of helper methods for easier caching, and session support.

<?php
use \Psr\Http\Message\ServerRequestInterface as Request;
use \Psr\Http\Message\ResponseInterface as Response;
 
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
 
$app = new \Slim\App;
$app->get('/hello/{name}', function (Request $request, Response $response, array $args) {
    $name = $args['name'];
    $response->getBody()->write("Hello, $name");
 
    return $response;
});
$app->run();

4. Bullet PHP

Bullet is a functional PHP micro-framework that helps you easily create REST APIs and web applications that automatically conform to the requirements of the HTTP specification. Bullet is resource and URI-oriented and comes pre-loaded with powerful HTTP features like content-negotiation and caching.

5. Phalcon

The micro-stack version of the full-stack Phalcon framework, it is one of the fastest-growing PHP micro-stacks for the same reasons that its big brother is making so many waves in the PHP community. The original Phalcon came out in 2005 from Columbian developer Andres Gutierrez, a 2012 TR35 winner. Micro-stack Phalcon is the fastest micro-framework available due to its implementation as an extension in C. However, Phalcon does not have much community support and lacks thorough third-party documentation.