PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. As of January 2013, PHP was installed on more than 240 million websites (39% of those sampled) and 2.1 million web servers.
There are myriad of php tools are being released every month, If you are a php developer and looking for some fresh and handy php tools for your development tasks then you are at right place. In this article we have gathered a list of Best PHP Development Tools 2014 that will simplifies your development tasks and help you to achieve desired results in certain period of time.
If you like the article you might be interested in our other article on 12 PHP Debugging Tools for Developers
1. Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a cross-platform text and source code editor, with a Python application programming interface (API). Sublime Text is proprietary software. Its functionality is extendable with plugins. A must have tools for php developers to work with it.
2. PHP-CPP
The PHP-CPP library is a C++ library for developing PHP extensions. It offers a collection of well documented and easy-to-use classes that can be used and extended to build native extensions for PHP. This C++ library makes building PHP extensions fun. Extensions build on top of PHP-CPP are easy to understand and simple to maintain, and your code looks great – and give a huge boost to your application!
3. Hoa
Hoa is a modular, extensible and structured set of PHP libraries. Moreover, Hoa aims at being a bridge between industrial and research worlds. This library is the foundation —the core— of all libraries of Hoa. It proposes fundamentals algorithms, paradigms and mechanisms and many more.
4. Mink
Mink is a PHP Library which lets you test your web apps interacts with browser properly. It removes the API differences between the two types of browser emulators, giving you a more accurate testing environment. Mink comes with PHPUnit, Behat and Symfony2 support out of the box.
5. Parsedown PHP
Parsedown is a parser for Markdown. It parses Markdown text the way people do. First, it divides texts into blocks. Then it looks at how these blocks start and how they relate to each other. Finally, it looks for special characters to identify inline elements. As a result, Parsedown is (super) fast, consistent and clean.
6. SlimStarter
SlimStarter is a bootstrap application built with Slim Framework in MVC architecture, with Laravel’s Eloquent as database provider (Model) and Twig as template engine (View). Additional package is Sentry as authentication provider and Slim-facade which provide easy access to underlying Slim API with static interface like Laravel syntax (built based on Laravel’s Facade).
7. Forp
forp is a PHP profiler written in C. forp is a lightweight PHP extension which provides the full call stack of your script, with CPU and memory usage, in a plain PHP Array or JSON output. forp is non intrusive and it provides PHP annotations to do its work. forp provides a structure so simple that it’s easy to make your own UI. forp lets you take the measurement of time and allocate memory of each function, file and line number of the function call, captions of functions, grouping of functions and many more.
8. Guzzle
Guzzle takes the pain out of sending HTTP requests and the redundancy out of creating web service clients. It’s a framework that includes the tools needed to create a robust web service client, including: Service descriptions for defining the inputs and outputs of an API, resource iterators for traversing paginated resources, batching for sending a large number of requests as efficiently as possible.
9. Belt
Belt is a collection of useful tools for PHP developers. It offers over 60 useful functions, and it’s fully tested.
10. Twig
Twig is a flexible, secure, and fast templating engine for PHP. It’s concise, with a template oriented syntax, and loaded with features.
11. Initial Based Icon Generator
It lets you generate Initial based icons with a colored background similar to Gmail’s.
12. Faker
Faker is a PHP library that generates fake data for you. Whether you need to bootstrap your database, create good-looking XML documents, fill-in your persistence to stress test it, or anonymize data taken from a production service, Faker is for you.
13. GeoCoder
Geocoder is a library which helps you build geo-aware applications. It provides an abstraction layer for geocoding manipulations. The library is split in two parts:HttpAdapter and Provider and is really extensible.
14. Composer
This dependency manager for PHP lets you create a composer.json file in your project root, run a single command, and all your dependencies are downloaded ready to use.
15. Directus
Directus is a free and open source content management framework written in PHP that provides a feature-rich environment for rapid development and management of custom MySQL database solutions.
16. Patternlab
There are impressive frontend frameworks around like Bootstrap, Foundation or Maxmertkit. Pattern Lab, although having similar features, is not one of them. It is more a framework for front-end frameworks, a PHP-powered static site generator or your project’s pattern library and frontend style guide. The tool comes with all the base styles for common scenarios like forms, lists, tables, responsive grid and more. But it doesn’t interfere the design at all and leaves it all to you.
17. Rainloop
RainLoop is a free and open source PHP webmail application for anyone willing to use a single interface for many accounts. The application has a modern user interface and supports both SMTP + IMAP. It doesn’t require a database as the e-mails are not stored by the app. The mail server is accessed directly and RainLoop simply displays the e-mails there.
18. The Prettifier
The Prettifier provides code formatting and syntax highlighting for common programming languages and file formats including JSON, CSS, HTML, XML, SQL, PHP, Perl, Apache Config, and JavaScript, where editing often takes place outside of an IDE.
19. Plates
Plates is a native PHP template system that’s fast, easy to use and easy to extend. It’s inspired by the excellent Twig template engine and tries to bring modern template language functionality to native PHP templates. Plates is designed for developers who prefer to use native PHP templates over compiled templates, such as Twig or Smarty.
20. Requests for PHP
Requests is a stable PHP library that uses cURL or fsockopen (depending on the availability) and provides a consistent API. It simplifies sending requests, accepts HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE or PATCH and adding headers, form data + multipart files. The library also works with international domain names, authentication, auto-decompressing gzipped responses and much more.
