When comparing CakePHP vs Lumen, the Slant community recommends Lumen for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks to create a web REST API?” Lumen is ranked 10th while CakePHP is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Lumen is:
Since it's basically just a minimal version of Laravel, it can be upgraded to a full Laravel app if the need arises. No need for code changes, just import the code to a new Laravel install.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Built-in ORM that's easy to use
Cake has a built-in ORM which is pretty easy to use and learn. Building queries can also be done very easily and fetching entire columns can be done in one or two lines of code.
Pro Fast development
Developing in CakePHP is very fast and flexible.
CakePHP is about fast and reliable development, it achieves this by following the convention over configuration principle as it's heavily inspired by Rails (which follows the same programming paradigm).
Convention over configuration is all about making it easier for the developer to start immediately writing code without worrying on what's going on "under the hood".
Pro Large library of helper classes
CakePHP has a large library of helper classes with features such as:
- Authorization
- AJAX
- Forms
- E-mails
- Internationalization
etc...
Pro Exhaustive list of resources to learn CakePHP
Cake's great community has thrown together an exhaustive and amazing list of resources to get started with CakePHP. It's open source and can be found on GitHub.
Pro Open Source
CakePHP open source and is licensed under the MIT license.
Pro Easily upgradable to Laravel
Since it's basically just a minimal version of Laravel, it can be upgraded to a full Laravel app if the need arises. No need for code changes, just import the code to a new Laravel install.
Pro Feature rich
Pro Highest performing PHP micro-Framework
Lumen is benchmarked at 100/rps (Requests Per Second) faster than Slim v3, which used to be considered the fastest and most performant micro-Framework to date with the ability to handle 1800/rps. (1900/rps vs 1800/rps respectively).
Pro Easy to use
Cons
Con Slow
Because of legacy code, old concepts and prioritizing development speed over everything else, CakePHP is bloated and slow.
Con Built for smaller tasks like APIs
Con It's based off Laravel and inherits its shortcomings
Lumen inherits many shortcomings of Laravel, such as static proxy classes.
Con Made to work alongside Laravel
Lumen as a framework is at it's full potential when used alongside it's older brother. Lumen was created to be used for microservices alongside Laravel, which is used for more user-facing applications. If a project is already using another framework other than Laravel, it would be better to use another microframework for microservices instead of Lumen.