Servage Magazine

Lumen is the name of a lightweight PHP framework based on Laravel. It offers a super quick way of starting simple projects that can grow easily. Lumen relies on the powerful foundation of Laravel, but offers a much simpler interface to program with. While much of the documentation shows that building applications with Lumen looks a lot like Laravel, it does offer the functionality in a simpler way.

Upgrade to Laravel anytime

Lumen does not give you all the features of Laravel. If you need all those features you should obviously choose the full framework, but for many small projects you would be better of with Lumen, because you can get started so quickly and build features super fast. The benefit is that you do not need to reinvent the wheel nor struggle with a much too large framework for the purpose. Lumen offers the things you need in small projects, and you can actually upgrade the codebase to use the full Laravel framework any time. This is a major benefit, because using Lumen does therefore not feel like a trade off. It is more the way to get started with smaller projects that do not need a full framework yet, but knowing that you always have the option to upgrade to the full framework any time.

Great performance

Benchmarks indicate that Lumen is one of the fastest PHP micro frameworks, providing quick load times and high performance in script execution. While working through the Lumen documentation you will see that it offers core modules for  requests, routing, middleware, controllers and views. Those are the core components of any framework and handle the entire request to response cycle.

Database integration

The lightweight version of Laravel also comes with database integration and a few other core features. This makes it suitable for virtually any kind of small-scale project. So you can add, edit and update data in databases, handle sessions, events and more with Lumen.

Example purposes

You may wonder what exactly Lumen may be useful for, and why not just go all the way with the full framework from the beginning? Well, there are a few good examples of that. If you create many small projects frequently which consist mostly of websites, but are not too complex and with custom application logic, then working with Lumen is an advantage, because setting up a regular website with Lumen is faster than with Laravel. Also if you start out building a simple project and do not yet know about any complex functionality or requirements before, you may be happy with the options in Lumen to start with. Knowing that you can upgrade your projects as their requirements get more complex, you can start more projects faster, and just take the successful ones to the next step.