php-restful-api-frameworks-with-features

Technology keeps on updating with the times and we need to update ourselves too. But we have some special and powerful technologies which are very old and still usable, so one of such technologies is "PHP". "PHP" is a very old technology that is still used in many places in the Internet world, more than 70% websites running on PHP.

Due to the high popularity of PHP, many frameworks are designed by developers to make the development process fast and easiest. As we know PHP is a very powerful programming language that can handle every situation and can fulfill the developer's requirements. So to develop a website in PHP is a very long process. Keeping all these things in mind, there are many "PHP" Frameworks created, which are still widely used. But let's first know what are "frameworks" and what can be their benefits then API and in the end "list of frameworks".

What Is Framework

The standard definition of, "framework" is an essential supporting structure of a building, vehicle, or object.

If we say in simple words, a web framework is software designed to support the development of web applications. Whose features you can keep according to yourself such as web services, web resources and web APIs etc.

Frameworks help us to design a fast and high-performance website because it renders pages without loading again the whole resources of a website this concept makes them popular.

One advantage of using frameworks is that they have a set of rules or standards for building and deploying web applications, due to this reason developing process becomes fast and reliable. For example database connection and table creation, authentication and authorization, session and flash management etc.

Laravel Framework Directory:

Benefits Of Using Frameworks

Although we will also look at the "features" of the framework we will study together, but if we talk about the overall common features and advantages, then they are something like this as you can see below. The given features are common in almost every web framework, be it PHP framework(Lumen, Leaf etc) or JavaScript(React, angular etc).

FEATURES:
01. Simple Development Process
02. More Work In Less Effort
03. Incredible Security And Encryption
04. Simplify Authentication And Authorization Process
05. Proper Errors Handling And Debugging
06. Easy To Perform CRUD Operation
07. Reduce Code Length And Maintenance

Backend Framework has all these features If you want to read Front-end Development Framework then you can visit the below article.

What Is API

API is also one of the features of Frameworks. In the Easiest words, API is the collection of standard rules(protocols) that provides a simple way to communicate between server and client. API stands for "Application Programming Interface", as we can imagine from the name how it would work. Indirectly it is similar to software that provides various services to the other pieces of software and platforms.

Through the API, developers handle the client request from any platform (like IOS, Android, Blackberry, etc) and API responds accordingly. You do not need to write separate server codes from every platform. This makes the communication process simple between two or more applications. As you can see in the image that we are able to exchange services with many platforms through API.

Basic-Indroduction-Of-RESTful-API-Working

Advantages Of Using API

Using API by developers is not just a make development process reliable and easy, it provides many advantages to the developer which are given below:

ADVANTAGES:
01. Make Fast And Reliable Development Process
02. Make Communicate Simple Between Softwares
03. Secure Server Data
04. You can scale the services as much as you want
05. Control and Stable Functionality of Application
06. Smooth Service Management

01. Lumen

Lumen is a PHP open-source micro-framework created by the Laravel founder Taylor Otwell. Lumen is a well-liked framework. It is a product of laravel so comparing laravel and lumen does not make sense because both have different useability. But Lumen is easy to use compared to Laravel because it is a lightweight, fast, and API micro-framework. Lumen is more focused on API services.

Lumen is one of the fastest micro-frameworks available in the market. You can learn about it from the official website of the lumen.

FEATURES:
01. Authentication And Authorization
02. Errors
03. Logging
04. Database
05. Encryption
06. Routing
07. Queues
08. Middleware
09. Controllers
10. Requests And Responses
11. Events And Cache,
12. Service Container And Providers
13. Unit Testing
14. Validation

02. Slim

Slim is also an extremely simple and powerful PHP framework to create Restful web applications. You can develop a full flash website in a single PHP file. It has all the demanded features like routing, authentication, scalability, etc.

Furthermore, it is utilized by many PHP developers to develop RESTful APIs and web services. More than 2500+ websites are using this framework for API services. Slim developers are continuously working on it; they have launched 4 versions. You can read full documentation from Slim's official website.

FEATURES:
01. Routing Concept
02. Custom views
03. Good Scalability
04. Reduce Debugging Process
05. HTTP caching
06. Signed cookies
07. Custom “404” And “500” page
08. Error handling and Logging
09. Incredible Security

03. Leaf

Leaf is a powerful PHP framework that will help us build clean and secure web apps. Leaf is lightweight and can be easily implemented on web apps. It can create high-performance applications. Also, it has an MVC concept which will make it more reliable and manageable.

You can download it from GitHub or Composer, both links are given below.

FEATURES:
01. Error Handling
02. Simple And Dynamic Routing Options
03. Middleware Concept (run before code runs)
04. HTTP response and requested
05. Session And Flash
06. Cookies And Header
07. Form Validation
08. Authentication
09. Password Helper
10. FileSystem(FS) concept to manage files
11. Modal View Controller(MVC) Principle

04. Guzzle

Guzzle is also a PHP framework that is open source. Guzzle is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services. It has a good reputation as a RESTful API framework in the market. There are currently seven versions of Guzzle available, with developers constantly improving their framework such that in Guzzle 7 it no longer requires cURLs to send HTTP requests. If curl is not installed, Guzzle will use the PHP stream wrapper to send the HTTP request. It has some incredible features in the latest version which are below.

FEATURES:
01. straightforward interface for POST requests, streaming large uploads and downloads, building query strings, JSON data uploading, HTTP cookies, etc.
02. it can smoothly consign synchronous and asynchronous requests.
03. Guzzle utilizes PSR-1, PSR-2, PSR-4 PSR-7 and PSR-18.
04. Strong client HTTP methods (get, head, put, post, patch, delete, getAsync, headAsync, putAsync, postAsync, patchAsync, and deleteAsync )
05. Service description DSL allows faster web service.
06.Symfony2 event-based plugin system allows completely modify the behavior of a request.
07. NodeJs web-server includes for testing clients.

05. Swoft

Swoft is a PHP Microservice, high-performance, full-stack framework. It gains more popularity within a few years and It has more than 5.4k stars on GitHub.

It has similar features as other PHP frameworks but some features are uniques which are given below.

FEATURES:
01. Based on Swoole extension
02. Built-in coroutine webserver (HTTP/Websocket/RPC/TCP)
03. High-performance routing
04. Powerful AOP (for faceted programming)
05. Flexible annotation function
06. Global dependency injection container
07. PSR-7-based HTTP message implementation
08. PSR-11-based container specification implementation
09. PSR-14 based event manager
10. Middleware based on PSR-15
11. PSR-16 based cache design
12. Scalable, high-performance RPC
13. RESTful support
14. Internationalization (i18n) support
15. Fast and flexible parameter validator
16. Complete service governance, fusing, downgrading, loading, registration and discovery
17. Universal connection pool Mysql, Redis, RPC
18. Database ORM
19. Coroutine, asynchronous task delivery
20. Custom user process
21. Powerful logging system

06. Ubiquity

Again we are discussing a very popular and extraordinary PHP framework ubiquity that continuously updates. It also uses MVC postulations to manage its working environment. This PHP framework has more than 500 stars on Github.

FEATURES:
01. Modal View Controller(MVC) Principle
02. PSR-4 composer autoloader
03. Routing Options
04. Dependency injection
05. ORM implementing Data Mapper
06. multi-database types support
07. Multi-level cache
08. Rest Server
09. Web admin interface (Webtools)
10. Scaffolding (CRUD, REST, Controllers, views, authentification)
11. Console Admin interface

07. Symfony

Symfony is one of the oldest PHP frameworks which is initially released in Oct 2005. So this framework has better services and features with respect to a new PHP framework. Apart from this, its developers & community continuously updating features. You can check its popularity on GitHub. There it has more than 25k+ stars and 8k+ forks.

FEATURES:
01. Simple And Sub-Domain Routing Options
02. Template Facility of render and reuse content
03. Great Security Options
04. MVC concept
05. Database supports
06. Logging And Mailer Support
07. Session Object Available
08. Translation And Testing
09. Validations
10. Scalable
11. Extreme security

08. Laminas

The Laminas Project is an open-source continuation of Zend Framework, a PHP framework and component library targeting enterprise applications. Its initial release was in March 2006. We can say this is a very old PHP framework so the possibility is very high to provide a number of features with proper documentation.

It provides users a support of the model–view–controller (MVC) and various useful components of web applications like dependency injection, event dispatchers, input validation and filtering, pagination, navigation, feed generation, and parsing, etc.

It builds PHP middleware applications, using the PSR-7 (HTTP Messages) and PSR-15 (HTTP Request Handlers) specifications. Besides this, It serves RESTful APIs using standards such as Hypertext Application Language.

FEATURES:
01. Better Routing Options
02. validation
03. authorization
04. authentication
05. dependency injection
06. Views and templates
07. Powerful Security
08. MVC Concept
09. Session And Flash

On 17 April 2019, it was announced that the framework is transitioning into an open-source project hosted by the Linux Foundation to be known as Laminas.

09. Fat-Free Framework

FatFreeFramework-RestfulAPI-PHP-Framework

Fat-Free was released as free software in 2009 but on 13 Dec 2020, it releases a stable version. It is an open-source PHP web framework that is distributed under the GNU (General Public License). This is also a very updated and high-performance PHP framework that helps us to design high-quality applications. This also provides all the features that any rich frameworks have for example view templates, database connection, routing etc.

FEATURES:
01. Proper Error Handling
02. Working with databases
03. Object-relational mappers (ORM)
04. Views and Templates
05. MVC Included
06. Fast and clean template engine
07. Unit testing toolkit
08. Javascript/CSS compressor
09. Custom logger
10. Basket/Shopping cart
11. SMTP over SSL/TLS
12. Tools for communicating with other servers
13. Data Validation
13. Routing Engine

10. Limonade

Limonade is a PHP micro-framework for fast and small web development. This framework is much lighter than other PHP frameworks and extremely flexible. The purpose of creating this framework is to make the API process easy and simple. It’s inspired by other frameworks like Sinatra or Camping in Ruby, or Orbit in Lua.

Limonade provides functions that complete the PHP basic set while keeping consistency with native functions and sitting upon them. It is easy to learn and provides everything that you can expect from a modern framework (MVC, RestAPI, etc). It has more than 700+ stars and 100+ forks on Github.

FEATURES:
01. Simple Routing Options
02. Callback controllers
03. URLs Rewriting
04. Views and templates
05. Great Security Options
06. Hooks and filters
07. MVC Postulate
08. Session And Flash
09. Halting And Error Handling

We try to provide you the best content, if there is any mistake in this article, then let us know.

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09+ Most Popular RESTful API Frameworks Of PHP