The Flight PHP Framework is an extensible micro-framework for PHP. It is characterized as being fast, simple, and built for developers seeking quick results with zero fuss.

Features:

Core Design and Architecture

• Lightweight and Straightforward: Flight has a low footprint and a straightforward design. It is meant to be lean but is capable of handling enterprise architecture requirements.

• Versatile Application: It is suitable for building classic web applications, blazing-fast APIs, or experimenting with the latest AI-powered tools.

• Extensibility: Flight is an extensible framework.

Performance

• High Performance: Flight is recognized for its High Performance and is cited as one of the fastest PHP frameworks available. The lightweight core contributes to less overhead and more speed.

• Benchmark Results: Benchmarks show high request throughput, such as 190,421 Plaintext Requests/sec and 182,491 JSON Requests/sec.

Audience and Scalability

• Beginner Friendly: It serves as a great starting point for new PHP developers due to its clear structure and simple syntax.

• Professional Control: Experienced developers appreciate Flight for its flexibility and control. It allows users to scale from a tiny prototype to a full-featured app without needing to switch frameworks.

AI Integration

• AI Friendly: The framework's minimal overhead and clean architecture make it ideal for integrating AI tools and APIs. This includes applications like building smart chatbots or AI-driven dashboards.

• Development Support for AI: The skeleton app comes with pre-built instructions files designed for the major AI coding assistants out of the box.

Development and Requirements

• Installation: Flight can be installed rapidly using Composer (composer require flightphp/core) or by downloading a zip file manually.

• Skeleton App: An example app/boilerplate structure (flightphp/skeleton) is available to help projects start quickly, providing a structured layout, basic configurations, and Composer scripts.

• Routing: The framework supports defining routes (e.g., Flight::route('/')) and handling responses, such as outputting JSON (e.g., Flight::json([...])).

• Requirements and Licensing: Flight requires PHP 7.4 or greater (with support for PHP >8). It is released under the MIT license.