A Guide to Lumen PHP: Write Code that Convert

Lumen is a PHP micro-framework developed by the creator of the Laravel framework. The idea behind Lumen is that it complements existing or future Laravel applications. It was developed with some particular purposes in mind, namely PHP development services, mobile app development services, microservices and APIs. A Lumen development company has the necessary knowhow and experience to make the most of these and deliver faster microservices.

Lumen utilizes most of the components that make up the Laravel framework. Its goal is to maximize performance by bringing in a wide array of changes. Some of them include:

Less configuration: Much of Lumen comes pre-configured. There’s no configuration directory in a Lumen install. Instead, developers have to utilize the .env files to configure most of the applications.

Different router: This is probably the most significant difference and the reason why it can be as fast as it is. Lumen doesn’t utilize the Symfony router like Laravel. Instead, Lumen uses FastRoute, a lightweight routing implementation.

Advantages over the competition

Developers use Lumen to create separate applications for each decoupled service. They can also use Lumen to build an API which could also be consumed by the main application with the help of an HTTP client. This decoupling allows them to scale and optimize the business side of the application without interfering with the rest.

The overall functionality of Lumen translates into being a smaller, simpler, leaner, and faster version of the complete web application framework. The Lumen framework has a foundation level that is the same as that of Laravel with similar components. It offers less configuration and different routing parameters in configuring web applications. This considerably helps in accelerating web development.

The Lumen microframework is a lighter form of Laravel and can provide specialized features such as API development, templating, cookies, routing, logging, HTTP sessions, etc. Lumen offers features such as eloquent, restful support and API features.

Why build a REST API in Lumen?

• Lumen is blazing fast.

• It can handle more requests per second than Laravel.

• It uses nikic/FastRoute instead of Symfony, thereby increasing performance. 

Why is it so useful?

Lumen has the same foundation as Laravel and glues together most of the same top components. As such, front-end niceties like Bootstrap and Elixir and the authentication bootstrap and sessions don’t come enabled out of the box, and there’s less flexibility for extending and changing the bootstrap files. However, unlike many other micro-frameworks, Lumen lets developers tap into the full power of Laravel’s features, such as routing, dependency injection, the Eloquent ORM, migrations, and queued jobs.

But Lumen is built for microservices and fast REST APIs, not so much for user-facing applications. It is for projects and components that can benefit from the convenience and power of Laravel but can afford to sacrifice some configuration and flexibility in exchange for a speed boost.

Lumen can be considered under Laravel Development services, which is mainly to strip down-speed of the site. It neither interrupts views and sessions nor other consumer-facing conveniences. It is just optimized for fast microservices.