Looks nice, I really like Slim Framework, this looks a lot like Slim from what I could tell. Gonna be interesting to see how (if at all) this will effect some performance focus from the Slim developers.
I completely agree. I've used Slim in lieu of Laravel for a number of small API projects. I'm excited about porting them over to Lumen.
Have you ever tried Flight, http://flightphp.com? It has a smaller footprint than Slim but still has the ability to drop in PHP components. Disclaimer, I'm the author of Flight.
Curious, but why don't your docs request that the install be done with Composer? Manually downloading a tarball isn't the best solution for managing an application dependency.
We (https://commando.io) use Flight for our API and love it. Super minimal, but provides all the functionality we require. The ability to map custom functions into the Flight namespace is great.
Official blog post on Lumen on the Slim Framework website: