Slim VS no-framework-tutorial

Currently Laravel is the "go to" for new PHP applications to mostly developers today, if not, plain PHP, Slim, Symfony and other frameworks does the job, but for Wordpress, custom PHP boilerplates or/and outdated PHP patterns (aka, single ton) is what we have for work in mostly cases, if not, hacky ways to integrate frameworks as Laravel itself or parts of it to leverage a better code structure.

Slim is a micro PHP framework used for web development with 11.7k stars and 2k forks on GitHub. It has a simple and intuitive API development process. It is a micro-framework, meaning you only get a minimum of support for HTTP requests and forwarding requests to appropriate controllers. So the question is, why should you choose a micro-framework? Because it offers you flexibility and high extensibility.

Slim 4, a minimalistic PHP micro-framework, offers middleware support to easily add CORS headers. Middleware in Slim acts like a series of layers through which your app sends a request. One such layer can be responsible for adding CORS headers.

SlimPHP 3 Skeleton app shows this as well: https://github.com/slimphp/Slim-Skeleton/blob/3.1.8/public/index.php

How hard did you look? There are plenty out there. FastRoute, Phroute, based on FastRoute, with basic middleware, League/Route - routing with middleware, using FastRoute, PSR 7 & 15, Slim Framework, at it's core, it like League/Route, etc. None of these require a full framework to use.

You can have the container call in a config folder with a file called dependencies or how ever you want. A few existing examples of this is here - Slim calls this app/dependencies in this skeleton project and Odan's Skeleton has this as config/container in their project.

Maybe use this if you don't like to dive into bigger frameworks: https://www.slimframework.com/

I myself learned by following the great "no-framework-tutorial": https://github.com/PatrickLouys/no-framework-tutorial Disclaimer: The last one is about 7 years old, so some things have changed, but all in all the information there is still valid.

No framework tutorial

Here's an all-in-one github repo that I found to be a nice build for the fundamentals: PatrickLouys/no-framework-tutorial

Use libraries or a micro framework if you are hesitant on using a full framework. Nothing wrong with Slim and some other libraries. Or bundle some libraries together to make your own slim (pun intended) framework - like this or this.

https://github.com/PatrickLouys/no-framework-tutorial also got turned into a book.

This tutorial (and subsequently the book) helped me a lot when learning OOPHP.

Do you already know how backends work? Maybe this can be a good read. Otherwise just look up the basic syntax and some quirks and you will be fine.

Search for "PHP without a framework" to find articles such as https://github.com/PatrickLouys/no-framework-tutorial that will show you how to "fill in the blanks" with libraries or simple code, or use a "microframework" such as Slim.