The Lumen microframework is a lightweight version of Laravel that uses the Laravel syntax and components and can be upgraded easily to Laravel. Lumen is a more specialized and stripped-down framework designed for PHP web development and API development. Some of the features in Laravel such as HTTP sessions, cookies, and templates are not needed, and Lumen takes them away, keeping what’s essential such as routing, logging, caching, queues, validation, error handling and more. Additionally, Lumen uses a faster router than Laravel, and many other features like Eloquent are disabled by default in Lumen.
RESTful API Development with Lumen
API is an approach that allows different applications or various parts of a single application to share data among each other by special programming commands. For any API service, speed is critical, because if it is not able to serve a large number of requests per second quickly, the business benefits of using the API will be significantly diminished. API development can be done using the blazing fast Lumen microframework, which is one of the quickest PHP micro-frameworks available in the world.
The Lumen microframework can be used to build an API for a web application to integrate it with mobile apps. It can be employed to build APIs for integrating different microservices within an extensive service/application.
Business Benefits of Microservice Architecture
Protection from failure: Microservice applications put a lot of emphasis on real-time monitoring and checking both architectural elements and business-relevant metrics. Semantic monitoring can provide an early warning system of something going wrong that triggers development teams to follow up and investigate.
Scalability: Microservices are independently scalable. With microservices, developers can make a change to a single service and deploy it independently for the rest of the system.
Decreasing team size and their productivity: Microservices enable developers to minimize the number of people working on each codebase to maintain a balance in team size and productivity. The less coordination required between teams, the more autonomy they have, as they can operate and evolve their services more freely.
Added Advantages of Lumen microframeworks
Being an ultra-light framework, Lumen is a favourite among developers all over the world. Here are some of its added advantages:
- Incredible speed
- Simple syntax
- Very easy migration of the project to the full-fledged Laravel framework
- Lumen provides a fast routing function due to the Fast Route library. This library provides the implementation of routing based on regular expressions
- It contains the Monolog library, which provides support for many ways of logging
