Slim vs Fat-Free Framework

Slim's documentation is well organized and detailed, every concept is thoroughly explained and it is very helpful for both advanced users and beginners.

Slim is minimal and that is a good thing if you want to start from there. It can be easily extended and even supports popular packages that are used in Laravel (like Illuminate\Database (eloquent)) for example.

REST fans will love the REST based architecture.

Rack is an interface used in Ruby frameworks used to group and order modules, which most of the time are Ruby classes, and specify between them.

Slim uses a simple concept for it's middleware. By wrapping HTTP requests and responses it unifies the middleware into a single method call.

Contains classes for managing requests, responses, cookies, logging, views, HTTP caching, and more.

Slim doesn't demand that you stick to a fixed folder structure. As long as you load Slim the right way you can do anything from there the way you like it.

Paired with swoole it's a micro service powerhouse.

The Slim Framework is open source and is released under the MIT public license

You can add any dependency, package or class that you want to use as a contained dependency.

In Django most things are abstracted, you just call some function or class without knowing how they were built, but with Slim, you end up understanding the way some abstract functions and classes are built.

Slim supports code hooks for executing functions at different points in time during the application's lifecycle.

The framework is very lightweight and fast. Even though it's pretty light, it still does not lose a lot of functionality.

Building an application that processes a URL (display a page, submit a form, invoke Ajax, etc.) requires very little code and can be achieved very quickly. Allows developers to focus on the application itself and not the plumbing.

After you download the framework it is very simple to get an app up and running very quickly. Makes it easy for newer PHP and web app developers to start using a MVC framework.

You know those frameworks that have updated 5 times during your own development phase? Well, F3 sees one or two updates per year. Never had any issues updating or upgrading. F3 just works.

Virtually everything is modular. You can choose which modules and libraries to include and to keep the framework as lightweight as possible.

Freedom to structure your projects' directories and codes as you wish.

F3 is a non-opinionated framework : you are entirely free to use the files/API/assets structure that you love.

Following a minimalistic approach, F3 tends to avoid adding code and structure that are not strictly necessary, while focusing on what really matters : coding your solution; actually you learn F3 while implementing/coding your project/webapp

Default view engine is superb and can also work with varieties of PHP view engines including Twig.

The community is responsive and helpful in clarifying the aspects of the framework.

The time to go from knowing nothing about Fat-Free to getting a project completed is very reduced compared to other bulky frameworks.

Concise and to the point documentation. Includes many examples and complete API reference.

You download a zip file and use it by placing require(); statement. No need to use composer, curl or any dependency injector which sometime become a great pain.

In a framework that's so small, it puts the rest to shame.

With many examples which are easy to follow by new users.