Comment by Guong Le on "Which framework is the best for building an API driven app in PHP?"

Silex / Lumen

They both provide minimum bootstrap.

Reading your comment about millions of records - has nothing to do with your framework and has all to do with SQL queries and how you code.

People who bash Lumen/Laravel + Symfony/Silex because its PHP and hop into NodeJS because of raw performance doesn't understand the architecture of scalability.

Both provides json output which is what you need as an API (try not to give back XML, as i will go Liam Nielson on you)
Request objects to ease up the code
able to bootstrap various ORMs to your framework (yes lumen is compatible with eloquen since the core is the same - however you can bootstrap silex with eloquent since illimuminate /eloquent can be part of your composer)
LTS both provides LTS support

I'm partial to Lumen because of pure community helpers - however if you try to do anything advance you might be stuck in a bind as i have faced. There are more out of the box packages compatible with Silex than Lumen/Laravel - however the community is getting more and more support to dev out compatiable drivers/packages. Watch out for documentation also - a lot of laravel base operations cannot be done in Lumen because it is a minimal framework - the minute you creep out of scope - you will want to ponder if it is not best to move to the big brother laravel in the end.

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