Laravel Lumen
Laravel Lumen is a micro-framework built by the creators of Laravel, designed for building fast, lightweight APIs and microservices. It is a stripped-down version of Laravel that focuses on speed and simplicity, removing many of the full-stack features to optimize performance for stateless, JSON-based applications. It leverages Laravel's core components like Eloquent ORM, routing, and middleware, but with a minimal footprint.
Developers should use Laravel Lumen when they need to build high-performance APIs or microservices that require minimal overhead and fast response times, such as for mobile app backends, IoT applications, or simple RESTful services. It is ideal for projects where the full Laravel framework would be overkill, but you still want access to Laravel's elegant syntax and key features. However, for complex web applications with extensive front-end needs or built-in features like sessions and views, the full Laravel framework is more suitable.