Today’s web developer should be fully equipped with latest tools in order to satisfy clients requirements and needs. While taking advantage of a powerful development environment such as NetBeans or PDT certainly helps, it’s also imperative to embrace sound practices that ensure high quality, testable code written with a minimum investment of time and effort.
In this article, I’ll introduce you some of the best php tools that are transforming the way today’s PHP developers go about building web sites. If you haven’t yet explored our php tools repository, I invite you to use this list as a starting point for learning more about what’s possible.
1. CLImate
CLImate allows you to easily output colored text, special formatting, and more. It makes output to the terminal clearer and debugging a lot simpler.
2. PHAP
PHAP allows you to write native mobile apps using PHP. It uses PHP for the functionality, and HTML/CSS for the UI, making it easy to create apps that run natively on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
3. Phred
Phred is an open-source initiative aimed at providing PHP with a consistent, completely object-oriented coding standard that enjoys a comfortable API for creating modern-day web applications with native support for Unicode, with components for internationalization and localization, clear-cut fundamental data types focused on performance and reliability, enhanced testing and debugging, and other features.
4. Snappy
Snappy uses PHP5 for snapshots or PDF generation from URL or an HTML page. It uses the webkit-based wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage.
5. Php-sass
php-sass is a pure PHP SASS to CSS compiler. It supports SCSS 3.2 syntax, imports and mixins, as well as Compass.
6. xmPP Error
A lightweight PHP error reporting and tracking tool using XMPP/Jabber messages. It has following features.
• Sending error messages of any level (error, warning, notice etc)
• Excluding certain error types or files from generating a message
• Tracking of functions and their arguments or variables throughout the script to identify procedure paths taken and variable changes
• Millisecond-timing of all steps
• In-process errors from the start of the script until shutdown
7. Oh My ZSH
A delightful community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 200+ optional plugins (rails, git, OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, php, python, etc), over 140 themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.
8. Simple Test
SimpleTest is a great automated testing solution, which like PHPUnit allows developers to write unit tests using familiar PHP syntax. Additionally, SimpleTest offers several features not natively available to PHPUnit (although these features can be used with PHPUnit in conjunction with third-party tools) such as Web interface testing, including the ability to test authentication and Web forms. Although not as well known as PHPUnit, SimpleTest’s user-friendly approach to testing continues to earn the framework accolades among many members of the PHP community.
9. Phing
PHing Is Not GNU make; it’s a PHP project build system or build tool based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP “task” classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework.
Features include running PHPUnit and SimpleTest unit tests (including test result and coverage reports), file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, Smarty template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS/SVN/GIT operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, documentation generation (DocBlox, PhpDocumentor) and much, much more.
10. phpDocumenter 2
phpDocumentor 2 is a tool that makes it possible to generate documentation directly from your PHP source code. With this you can provide your consumers with more information regarding the functionality embedded within your source and not just what is usable to them from your user interface. Documentation generated by phpDocumentor 2 does not aim to be a replacement for conventional documentation but is rather supplemental, or reference, documentation.
11. PHP Beautifier
Another hindrance to understanding the intent of source code is poor formatting. Yet in the heat of banging out reams of new scripts, it can be easy to improperly indent and organize your code. You can automate this process using the PEAR package PHP_Beautifier, which among other tasks will properly indent your code and add newlines.
12. Twig
Twig is a flexible, secure, and fast templating engine for PHP. It’s concise, with a template oriented syntax, and loaded with features. Twig has a sandbox mode to evaluate untrusted template code. This allows Twig to be used as a template language for applications where users may modify the template design. Twig is powered by a flexible lexer and parser. This allows the developer to define its own custom tags and filters, and create its own DSL.
