Top 13 Extremely Useful PHP Tools

PHP is a widely used open-source server side scripting language. It is powering major websites like Facebook, WordPress and many more. It provides some good reasons as why developers prefer PHP over other server-side scripting languages. Such as, Ruby, Python etc.

PHP considers very fast language. It has detailed documentation, large community, ready-to-use scripts and supported frameworks. Also, the most important thing about PHP means the easy to start with rather than any other scripting language. PHP language comes with useful tools and resources which makes the whole PHP development process easy, effective and quicker.

Here, I am going to present some useful PHP tools which can significantly improve the whole development process

Webgrind

Precisely, Webgrind knows as a debugging tool. It provides an Xdebug profiling web front end in PHP 5. It can install in seconds and works on all platforms.

Xdebug

Xdebug presents popular debugging PHP tool. Prcisely, it helps in providing lots of useful data to quickly identify the bugs in the source code. The tool can easily plug into almost every popular PHP application like PHPEclipse and PHPDesigner.

PHPUnit

PHPUnit, a complete whole port of the JUNIT. This tool helps to test the web applications stability and adaptability. So, it can write test cases within the PHPUnit framework with an easy usage.

Selenium

The tool allows to write automatic web application UI tests in any programming language. It seems against to any HTTP website which uses any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser. Hence, the tool can use in combination with PHPUnit to create and run automated tests within the web browser.

PHPDocumentor

PHPDocumentor aka Phpdoc or Phpdocu provides great documentation tool for the PHP code. It contains numerous amounts of features such as the ability to produce results in HTML, PDF, CHM and XML DocBook formats. So, it serves both web-based and command line interfaces along with source code highlighting.

Securimage

Securimage tool serves as free and open-source PHP CAPTCHA script. It generates complex, difficult images and CAPTCHA codes to give extra protection to your forms.

Pixy: PHP Security Scanner

Pixy, a Java program which automatically scans PHP 4 source code to detect XSS and SQL injections possibilities. The tool takes PHP program as an input and list out all the possible vulnerabilities found in the code. It supports along with important additional information to help in the understanding of the vulnerability.

PHP/SWF Charts

It means one of the powerful PHP tools which lets your create attractive web charts. The graphs serves from dynamic data and one can make use of PHP scripts to generate and collect data from databases. Then, it makes use of this tool can create flash (SWF) charts and graphs.

PHPMathPublisher

PHPMathPublisher provides great services as a tool. It can edit mathematical documents on the web by using the PHP script. However, it needs no additional LaTex programs on server or MathML.

PHP Object Generator

Here, PHP Object Generator serves as a great tool. It provides an open-source web-based tool which helps you quickly construct PHP objects. Also, it utilizes OOP (object-oriented programming) principles in the code.

Scavenger

Another, there comes an open-source tool with a name The Scavenger, vulnerability detection tool. The tool helps to react to exposure findings, track vulnerability findings. It also reviews accepted and false-positive answered vulnerability.

MagickWand for PHP

The tool MagickWand also serves PHP. It means, a PHP module suite to work with the ImageMagick API. You will find it helpful to create, edit and compose bitmap images. So, the tool supports very easy function and quickly incorporate image-editing features in the PHP applications.

PHP Code Beautifier

The PHP CodeBeautifier tool saves your time to format the code to present it in your own way. Precisely, the GUI version allows processing files visually. A command line version can also integrate along with other tools. It can also support as an integrated tool of PHPEdit.

Well, all these tools provide ideal assistance and some serve its extremely useful services as PHP tools. It can help in profiling, debugging, testing and code-authoring PHP code. Know some more? Do let us know in the comment below.