I understand that you want something simple, but I'd still recommend giving Laravel a try. When you use it without the bootstrapping it is quite clean and if you only want to build an API you can simply ignore / remove all the UI and user management stuff.
I'm actually a mobile developer and only got into backend development very recently. I tried different frameworks but I found Laravel the easiest and quickest to learn. Especially because it has very good documentation and a vivid community. So it is quite easy to find solutions for common problems.
For example I just built a Slack bot for chat roulettes in Laravel. I didn't use any of the bootstrapping and build all the APIs manually. But I could tap into the Laravel ecosystem for things like OAuth, Payments and interactive UI (LiveWire), which saved a lot of time.
I understand that you want something simple, but I'd still recommend giving Laravel a try. When you use it without the bootstrapping it is quite clean and if you only want to build an API you can simply ignore / remove all the UI and user management stuff.
I'm actually a mobile developer and only got into backend development very recently. I tried different frameworks but I found Laravel the easiest and quickest to learn. Especially because it has very good documentation and a vivid community. So it is quite easy to find solutions for common problems.
For example I just built a Slack bot for chat roulettes in Laravel. I didn't use any of the bootstrapping and build all the APIs manually. But I could tap into the Laravel ecosystem for things like OAuth, Payments and interactive UI (LiveWire), which saved a lot of time.
Thank you, I definetely need to learn more about laravel