15 Extremely Useful PHP Tools
Johnny LeePHP is indeed faster, and it is with no doubt the most used scripting language in practice; it has detailed documentation, a huge community, numerous ready-to-use scripts and easily supported frameworks; and most importantly, it’s a lot easier to fix bugs out with PHP than with other scripting languages, Python, for instance.
Webgrind
A Xdebug profiling Web front end in PHP 5. Webgrind implements a subset of the features of kcachegrind, it installs in seconds and works on all platforms. For quick ‘n’ dirty optimizations, it surely does its job.
Xdebug
One, if not the most popular debugging PHP extensions. Xdebug provides loads of useful data to help you rapidly find bugs in your source code. It just plugs right into countless of the most popular PHP applications, such as PHPEclipse and phpDesigner.
DBG
A robust and popular PHP debugger for use in local and remote PHP debugging. DBG plugs into several PHP IDE’s and can be used with the command line with ease and comfort.
PHP_Debug
An open-source project that gives you worthwhile information about your PHP code that can be used for debugging. PHP_Debug can yield dispensation times of your PHP and SQL, check the performance of a particular code blocks and get variable dumps in graphical form, which is excellent if you need a extra visual output than the one given to you by print_r() or var_dump().
PHPUnit
A comprehensive port of the popular JUnit unit testing suite to PHP 5. PHPUnit is a tool that will help you test your Web application’s steadiness and scalability. Writing test cases within the PHPUnit framework is easy and convenient.
dBug
ColdFusion’s cfDump for PHP. dBug is a meek tool that’s used for outputting data tables that comprise info about arrays, classes and objects, database resources and XML resources, making it very beneficial and necessary for debugging purposes.
Selenium
Selenium Remote Control (RC) is a trial tool that will tolerate you to write automatic Web application UI tests in any programming language in contradiction of any HTTP website using any typical JavaScript-enabled browser. Selenium can be used in the aggregation with PHPUnit to generate and run automated tests within a Web browser.
PHP_CodeSniffer
A PHP 5 script that was enhanced for sensing conformance to a predefined PHP coding preference. PHP_CodeSniffer is with no doubt a very helpful tool for upholding uniform coding styles for large projects and teams.
phpDocumentor
Also known as PHP doc and PHP docs. phpDocumentor is a documentation tool for your PHP source code. It has an innumerable amount of features, that includes the ability to output in HTML, PDF, CHM and XML DocBook formats, and has both a Web-based and command-line interface as well as source code highlighting.
Securimage
A free, open-source PHP CAPTCHA script. Securimage is used for creating composite images and CAPTCHA codes to shelter forms from junk mail and exploitation.
Scavenger
Scavenger is an open-source, real-time vulnerability administration tool. It helps the system administrators to react to the exposure findings, track liability findings and appraise the accepted and false-positive answered vulnerabilities, without “niggling” them with old liabilities.
PHP DOX
An AJAX-powered PHP documentation search engine. PHP DOX will empower you to lookup designations from all PHP documentation pages.
pChart
A PHP class oriented framework designed to create aliased charts. Most of the today’s chart libraries have a cost; pChart is totally free. Data can be retrieved from SQL queries or CSV files or can be manually provided.
WideImage
A PHP library for a vibrant image handling and dispensation for PHP 5. To be able to use WideImage, you should have the GD PHP extension mounted on your Web server.
PHP_Beautifier
As its name suggests, PHP Beautifier is a PEAR bundle for inevitably configuring and “enhancing” PHP 4 and PHP 5 source code.
