The creators of the Laravel framework (Taylor Otwell and crew) have just released a new micro-framework based on some of the ideals and components that power the full version of Laravel - Lumen. In this post to the Laravel News site they talk some about the framework and what it has to offer.

Lumen is a brand new PHP framework from Taylor Otwell designed for building lightning fast micro-services and API’s. When speed is a necessity, Lumen should be your first choice.

One of the neat things about the framework is you can still use all the Laravel features you love like Eloquent, caching, queues, validation, routing, middleware, and the powerful Laravel service container. Plus if you start your project with Lumen and eventually need even more power, moving to the full featured Laravel is a simple process.

They interviewed Taylor about the framework answering:

• What made you decide to create Lumen?
• Where did the name Lumen come from?
• Being able to upgrade right into Laravel is huge. Was this the plan from the beginning?
• How were you able to get the framework so fast, while still keeping so many great features?

Check out the full post for the answers and more details about the framework itself.