If you have used Spring Boot, you already know most of Winter Boot.

In an earlier job I was writing Spring Boot and PHP side by side. Spring Boot hooked me. You could start implementing right away, dependency injection just worked, and convention over configuration meant the code I wrote was my app logic and little else. Microservices came together fast. So I kept asking myself: why can't we do this in PHP? I made the first commit in February 2021 to find out.

Winter Boot is an open-source framework for writing microservices in PHP 8.5. It takes the Spring Boot programming model (beans, dependency injection, declarative transactions, caching, scheduling) and maps it onto PHP attributes. There is no XML and no code generation step.

This post is a short tour, not a manual.…