Gratis PHP framework for AJAX (only)

Question

I have been coding PHP for a few decades now, but have never used a framework. Instead I have a home-brew collection of common functionality.

I am considering a PHP framework and wonder what is available. I welcome answers from personal experience.

I am interested in AJAX only, but won't reject anything that handles other stuff, just as long as I get good, stable AJAX (the only non-Ajax functionality that I can imagine using is user registration/change password/lost password, but I can get that elsewhere).

• I currently use PDO to connect to MySql and would like that to be supported.
• I would appreciate good exception handling & debugging possibilities.
• and security features
• I suppose that raw speed plays a part.
• as does documentation, examples, tutorials, forums

Anything other features? I am not really sure what to expect from a framework.

Answer 1

I use laravel for a few years now and I'm very happy with that framework. Documentation can be found on https://laravel.com

If you need only backend functionality for maybe an API there is also a smaller and lighter version available called lumen. Infos at https://lumen.laravel.com

There are also many other ones like http://www.slimframework.com or https://silex.symfony.com

In the end you have to compare a few for yourself to test which one fits your needs.

What to expect from laravel framework:

• very easy to use database handling (With model classes; called "eloquent")
• build in error handling doc
• build in security features like authentication, encryption, email verification
• build in support for different file storages (local, S3, ftp, ...)
• queue, jobs, tasks
• official packages for api authentication, payments, ...
• and tons of other features

To get started with API development you would create a route like

Route::get('version', function () {
    return ['version' => 'v0.0.1'];
});

and call it from javascript like

fetch('/version')
.then((response) => {
  return response.json();
})
.then((myJson) => {
  console.log('API version: ' + myJson.version);
});