After its release, it didn’t take long for PHP to be considered as one of the most reliable open source technologies in the world. As a matter of fact, PHP stands at the forefront among companies offering open source development services. With great overall reliability and a huge community backing it, PHP is now a widely used server-side scripting language.
Complementing its many benefits is the presence of a broad range of tools – both free and premium that enable developers to get creative with the language.
In this blog, we present to you a list of a few great PHP tools that web developers would never regret using.
PhpStorm
PhpStorm is a widely popular commercial IDE for PHP that can help streamline application development considerably. It offers integration with various popular PHP tools as well as relational databases, and supports widely used PHP frameworks and CMS solutions including but not limited to WordPress, Drupal, and Magento.
NetBeans Bundle for PHP
The PHP developer community welcomed the NetBeans Bundle for PHP with open arms. The bundle includes a plethora of great features – from semantic analysis with parameter highlighting to Symfony, Zend, and Yii framework support. In addition, it also supports code debugging with xdebug and unit testing with Selenium.
DebugBar
DebugBar is a PHP testing tool capable of identifying both HTML and JavaScript bugs. In addition, the tool is also capable of monitoring network traffic, evaluating JavaScript code, and inspecting CSS elements.
phpDox
phpDox is a great solution for developers who require quick API documentation for a PHP application. The tool comes with a search feature and also offers information on code complexity and code coverage. In addition, developers can augment its functionality by adding more plugins.
RIPS
RIPS originated as an open source tool but now is one of the leading security analysis solution for PHP. It’s a premium tool that offers consistently better threat analysis without false positives. RIPS code analysis is preferred by many developers to detect unknown security issues.
New Relic
New Relic is a great alternative to the already popular Retrace. It comes with thorough applied intelligence-powered performance monitoring capabilities in addition to infrastructure monitoring and user data analysis. Developers can use it to understand app performance dependencies and bottlenecks.
Aptana Studio
Aptana Studio claims to be the world’s most powerful open source web development IDE, and it has loads of features to back that claim. What’s so great about Aptana Studio is that it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has a built-in PHP server and debugging tool to build and test apps in one environment.
Sublime Text
Unlike most other tools in this list, Sublime Text is just a text editor. But a good one at that. The go-to-anything feature is what makes Sublime Text a winner for our developers. The text editor lets developers quickly locate lines of code, and allows simultaneous editing – change multiple code instances at once. It’s not a free tool though. But a one-time fee of $80 makes it a wallet-friendly tool for developers.
Selenium
There aren’t many developers out there who haven’t heard about Selenium. It’s a lightweight, open source testing framework compatible with the most popular browsers. Selenium allows users to create their own custom UI tests in any language and can also automate certain web-based administration tasks. It’s also a favorite for many companies offering Agile software development services.
Conclusion
There seems to be an abundance of open source PHP solutions that developers can choose from. We know that this list above is not complete, and requires quite a few other mentions. We simply wanted to keep things short and mention the ones that we personally know are worthwhile. We are sure the tools mentioned in this blog can aid any software development company specializing in PHP development.
