Slim framework – The best micro-framework to easily create small web applications

PHP Is Ruling The Web Industry

In this digital age, various types of programming languages are used to develop a website or a web application. Of all the computer languages, PHP is considered to be the best. It not only has a large user base, but is also very popular in the programming industry. Being the best server scripting language, it is preferred by most coders. Here are five reasons why PHP is still the best even there are many advancements in similar programming languages:

• PHP is easy to learn, and apply
• Most of the new CMS platforms are built using PHP
• PHP has the best-in-the-industry documentation and friendly community
• With top security features, PHP is secured from threats and vulnerabilities
• PHP is said to have all the modern features that a web developer needs

Rise Of Micro-frameworks

PHP’s full stack frameworks help developers find everything easily as all the libraries are provided in one package. This makes it easy for the coders to work on any project. Moreover, Ruby On Rails and Django available in PHP are recognized as the best full stack frameworks used for creating web applications. With more programmers using this computing language, these frameworks got better updates, offering better techniques to handle large and complex website development projects. The downside of these constant updates is that it completely reduced the speed of the development. Plus, the updates made it tad too hard to develop simple applications and websites.

To overcome these challenges, micro-frameworks were created to quickly develop smaller applications. Also in few cases, these micro frameworks ensured faster testing and easier deployment. PHP has a large number of micro-frameworks such as:

• Slim
• Silex
• Phalcon
• Lumen
• Wave

Slim Framework

All the above-listed frameworks are popular among developers, but Slim is said to the favorite of most small application developers. Slim is a micro framework mostly used for coding simple APIs and web applications. It is popular because of its special features such as:

• Fast and powerful HTTP routing for designing SEO-friendly URLs
• HTTP caching for improved website performance and using less cache
• Secured cookies for improving the security of the system
• Error handling and debugging for easy testing
• Dependency injection for controlling external tools

Slim has more than 960,000 downloads and is ranked in the top 15 of the SitePoint survey for top PHP frameworks of 2015. Josh Lockhart, who is the author of popular books like “PHP the Right Way” and “Modern PHP”, created SLIM. Since its first stable release in 2010, Slim is one of the top performers in the PHP framework category. A team of well-qualified and like-minded programmers keep the Slim framework up to date.

Advantages Of Opting Slim Framework

Slim framework is popular because of the following advantages:

• Slim is the fastest micro RESTful framework
• It is full PSR-7 complaint
• It comes with useful classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, etc.
• Slim framework has good documentation
• It has excellent scalability
• Is easy to learn
• Slim uses easy and straightforward concept for its middleware
• It supports code hooks

Comparing Slim With Other Micro-frameworks

Getting Started With Slim Framework

Ranked top among the best PHP frameworks, Slim has a well organized and detailed documentations in which every concept is well explained. Get started with Slim using the following steps:

• Download Slim framework and extract it in the project directory
• Login to MySQL and create a database for SLIM to interact
• Start your first application