So far, we have created a very basic RESTful web service in Core PHP and identified flaws regarding design and security. We have also seen that to make things better we don't need to create everything from scratch. In fact, using open source code that is time tested makes more sense, to build better web services based on cleaner code.
In the last chapter, we have seen that Composer is a dependency manager for PHP projects. In this chapter, we will use an open source micro-framework to write RESTful web services. We will do the same work in an open source micro-framework that is in active development, time tested and well known in PHP community. The reason for using a framework instead of few components is that a proper framework can make a good structure of our code, and it comes with some basic required components. The micro-framework we have chosen is Lumen, a micro-framework version of the full-stack framework Laravel.
Here is what...