In a recent project, my team needed a micro backend for a small educational simulation game which was mostly client-side code. The backend responsibilities was to start a game, persist its state and synchronize players along the various phases of the game.

There were so little backend tasks involved that the primary discussion lead to a ā€˜no framework' approach. But after a great presentation by Igor Wiedler at Liip Zurich, we decided to use the Silex PHP micro-framework for our minimal backend needs.

In a single file of 200 lines of code (comments and spaces included), we wrote controllers for 9 distinct routes, benefited from the DoctrineExtension to connect to the DB (no ORM) and from the TwigExtension for templating.

It was fun, fast and allowed us to concentrate on the real challenges of the project.

The main difficulty we encountered with Silex was due to its spartan documentation, which, since then, has been updated to include documentation on extensions.

Thanks to our fellow liipers who proposed and convinced us to use this grand micro framework!