[Re]Encoded.com

15 Indispensible Tools For PHP Developers

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages.  As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line  mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel.

In this article, we have listed some of the very important and indispensible tools and resources for PHP developers

Phing

A project build system 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, file transformations, file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS/SVN operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, and much more.

BeautifyPHP

Beautify PHP is a completely free service that allows visitors to properly format their PHP code according to PEAR standards.

PHP Beautifier

This program reformat and beautify PHP 4 and PHP 5 source code files automatically. The program is Open Source and distributed under the terms of PHP Licence. It is written in PHP 5 and has a command line tool.

PHP Object Generator

An open source PHP code generator which automatically generates clean & tested Object Oriented code for your PHP4/PHP5 application. By generating PHP objects with integrated CRUD methods, POG gives you a head start in any project.

Instant SQL Formatter

Instant SQL Formatter is a free online SQL tidy tool. In addition to beautifying SQL code, It can translate SQL code into C#, Java, PHP, DELPHI and other program languages. It also allows you to find out all database objects such as table, column, function in SQL by selecting output format to list database object.

phpMyEdit

MySQL Table Editor and PHP Code Generator. Important features offered by phpMyEdit are: table manipulation code generation; record addition, change, view, copy and removal; table paging, sorting and filtering; lookups into other tables (1:M bindings); permission configuration; multiple navigation style possibilities; output design control using CSS; logging user actions; Multilanguage support;ability to extend base class.

PHP Obfuscator

PHP obfuscation allows you to scramble your PHP code. Obfuscation allows you to provide normal PHP files that have been encoded making the source code difficult to reverse engineer. Unlike some other solutions PHP Obfuscator does not require special server side libraries or server components to work properly. This allows you to target a broad range of servers that support PHP. This may be useful for commercial products looking to secure their source code.

PHP Depend

PHP Depend is software analyzer and metric tool which aims to provide many useful information about a specified PHP project. PHP Depend can generate a large set of software metrics from a given code base, these values can be used to measure the quality of a software project and they help to identify that parts of an application where a refactoring should be applied.

PHP CodeSniffer

PHP CodeSniffer is a PHP5 script that tokenizes and “sniffs” PHP code to detect violations of a defined set of coding standards. It is an essential development tool that ensures that your code remains clean and consistent. It can even help prevent some common semantic errors made by developers.

Aptana Studios

Aptana PHP is the robust, free, open source IDE for PHP featuring everything you need to get started fast and get even faster with developing, testing, tuning, and deploying your PHP apps. From pre-installed PHP servers, code assist, code templates, code generation, debugging, refactoring, Smarty editor, database tools and more, Aptana PHP gives you the end-to-end tools you need for PHP plus all the rest that Aptana Studio has to offer.

PHPanywhere

A web based free Integrated Development Environment for the PHP language, in other words it is an application that gives developers all the code editing capabilities they need to develop PHP applications online. It includes a real-time syntax code editor with support for all web formats and a powerful FTP editor.

Dia

Dia is inspired by the commercial Windows program ‘Visio’, though more geared towards informal diagrams for casual use. It can be used to draw many different kinds of diagrams. It currently has special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many other diagrams. It is also possible to add support for new shapes by writing simple XML files, using a subset of SVG to draw the shape.

ArgoUML

ArgoUML is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams. It runs on any Java platform and is available in ten languages

PHP MVC Frameworks

Most (if not all) MVC style frameworks, written in PHP, are listed here. MVC (model view controller) is design pattern frequently applied to web based applications. It’s not the only way to go though.

Turck MMCache

Turck MMCache is a free open source PHP accelerator, optimizer, encoder and dynamic content cache for PHP. It increases performance of PHP scripts by caching them in compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. Also it uses some optimizations to speed up execution of PHP scripts. Turck MMCache typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

• Tweet