Any PHP developer knows how expensive it can be when starting a new project. You’ve got licensing costs, additional costs for hosting and then there’s the cost of the development team who will be involved in delivering your project — and that’s just to get started! It often seems like a better idea to keep your projects small and not spend much money on them.
But, if you work on projects like this, knowing they could be so much better than they are currently, how do you deal with it?
Zend Studio
Zend Studio is amongst the top commercial PHP IDE from the development house of the organization named Zend and targets proficient web developers.
Zend as a company provides all the things covering PHP functionalities and has a huge number of clientele utilizing one or other of its products that assists PHP development with a supreme breeze. Some of its top clients incorporate companies like DHL, BNP Paribas Credit Suisse, and Agilent Technologies.
Zend Studio is enabled on Windows, OS X, and Linux and works with most recent PHP versions counting PHP 7. Zend Studio comes with an instinctive user interface and offers most of the up to date features and tools that lend a hand to speed up PHP and web development with multiple purposes. Some of the essential features of Zend Studio comprise
Swifter performance in indexing, validation and searching PHP code
Debugging with Xdebug, Zend Debugger, and integration with Z-Ray
Hold up the Eclipse plugins ecosystem, Docker and Git Flow support
Sharp code editor which supports PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and HTML
Deployment sustenance which included cloud support for Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure
Backing for PHP 7 express migration and flawless integration with Zend serverA powerful feature of Zend is its support for mobile application development on the peak of live PHP apps and server system backend. This offers a good initiation in development when it comes to harmonizing present websites and web applications with mobile-based apps.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) is a free and open-source code editor created by Microsoft for such platforms as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Besides PHP, it can be used with a variety of programming languages, including Python, Java, JavaScript, C++, Go, Node.js, T-SQL, C#, .NET Core, HTML, CSS, SCSS, Less, JSON, TypeScript, Markdown, PowerShell, and more.
Here are some of the best features of VS Code:
- Smart code completion with IntelliSense;
- Built-in Emmet support;
- Linting;
- Debugging;
- Refactoring;
- Syntax highlighting;
- Snippets;
- Intelligent code completion (autocomplete);
- Code navigation;
- Extensibility (developers are allowed to create their own extension);
- Embedded Git and GitHub integration;
- Integrated terminal;
- Live share for pair programming;
- Full customization from color theme picker and key bindings to integrations and functionality.
Docker
The tool takes away repetitive, mundane configuration tasks and can be used throughout the development lifecycle. Docker is a set of PaaS (platform as a service) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers that can run on all major platforms including Linux, Windows, or macOS.
Docker can package an app and all its dependencies in containers that are isolated from one another so that you can:
- Have isolated environments between projects;
- Test code with different versions;
- Do both these things with a small footprint.
Containers that have all the virtualization capabilities and use fewer resources than virtual machines make Docker much more lightweight than the traditional virtual machines. Docker allows development teams to:
- Deliver multiple apps hassle-free;
- Run all the apps the same way on all the environments (design, testing, staging, production);
- Deploy the apps in different languages and separate containers independently;
- Reduce the risk of conflict between languages/libraries/frameworks.
PHPUnit
It is a unit testing framework that is an instance of the xUnit architecture. The main goal of this tool is to help developers to reveal the errors in the newly committed code as fast as possible and assert that no code regression has occurred in the codebase. PHPUnit uses assertions to verify that the tested unit is correct and behaves as expected. Therefore, developers can find problems and mistakes early in the development cycle. The test results can be output in different formats like TestDox, JUnit XML, and others.
XDebug
If you want to improve the performance of your PHP code, reveal the bottlenecks, and increase the development experience, then this extension with a wide range of useful features is what you need to try for sure. XDebug is an extension for PHP that provides debugging and profiling capabilities.
XDebug comes as a PHP extension. It is a tool for profiling and debugging PHP scripts that uses the DBGp debugging protocol and allows developers to quickly localize an error in the code by providing the following information and features:
- Memory allocation;
- Tracing: function and stack traces in error messages, including:
- The function name, file name, line indications;
- Full parameter display for user-defined functions;
- Support for member functions;
- Protection for infinite recursions.
Apart from that, XDebug also delivers:
- PHP scripts’ profiling information;
- Code coverage analysis;
- A debugger front-end so that the developer can debug the scripts interactively.
The extension is also available via the PECL.
Bitbucket/GitLab CI/CD
GitLab and Bitbucket can be categorized as Code Collaboration and Version Control tools. Each tool provides a pack of useful features to speed up the development process, making it more efficient. Let’s check what is the main difference between them.
Bitbucket is a PHP development tool that provides software engineers with the ability to:
- Plan projects;
- Collaborate on code;
- Conduct tests;
- Deploy.
And the highlight of the tool is that all is with free private Git repositories. Besides that, Bitbucket has the following features:
- Built-in CI/CD;
- Superior (best-in-class) Jira integration;
- Up to 5 users can be added for free;
- Simple setup;
- Unlimited private repositories, etc.
GitLab is an open-source self-hosted Git management software that can be installed on-premise and connected with LDAP and Active Directory servers for secure authorization and authentication.
The key features of the tool that make it a choice of PHP developers are:
- A single server handling more than 25,000 users;
- Several active servers;
- Git repository management with fine-grained access controls;
- Provides merge requests for enhancing collaboration and performing code reviews;
- Activity feeds and wikis;
- Issue tracking, and many more.
Swagger
It’s a Documentation as a Service tool and a dependency-free collection of HTML, Javascript, and CSS assets. Swagger generates interactive OpenAPI documentation for the RESTful API, using doctrine annotations.
The main features of the tool include the following ones:
- Compatibility with the OpenAPI 3.0 specification;
- Command-line interface;
- Ability to extract information from code, existing phpdoc annotations;
- Exceptional error reporting (with hints, context);
- Getting started guide.
Such brands as Clever, triGo GmbH, and Hootsuite are already leveraging the benefits of Swagger.
Codeception
Codeception is a multi-featured testing framework that allows writing unit, functional, integration, and acceptance tests in a single, coherent style. All the tests are written in a Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) style — descriptive manner. This means that developers can clearly understand what part of the code is being tested and how it is performed just by taking a look at the test body.
PHPStan/Psalm
PHPStan and Psalm are open-source and static analysis tools that can be classified as “Code Review” tools. They are used for improving the quality of the code. Let’s observe the key features.
| PHPStan | Psalm |
|---|---|
| Catches whole classes of bugs;Focuses on finding errors in the code without actually running it;Moves PHP closer to compiled languages. | Identifies both hard-to-spot and obvious bugs in the code that can be missed by a human;Enables developers to take advantage of safe coding patterns;Helps to prevent a lot of type-related runtime errors;Is useful on both small legacy codebases and large ones. |
Postman
It is a scalable API testing tool and a complete API development environment. It quickly integrates into the CI/CD pipeline and is used for simplifying API workflow in development and testing.
Here are the main reasons to use Postman for your project:
- Accessibility: a developer needs to just log in to his/her account to access files anytime, anywhere as long as a Postman app is installed on the PC.
- Collections: users are allowed to create collections for their Postman API calls with subfolders as well as multiple requests can be created for each collection for organizing the test suites.
- Collaboration: team members can share files easily because collections and environments can be imported/exported.
- Environments: developers can not only create different environments but use the same collection for different environments.
- Tests: test checkpoints can be added to each Postman API calls to ensure test coverage.
- Automation testing: tests can be run in multiple iterations, saving time for repetitive tests.
- Debugging: developers can check what data has been retrieved to simplify debug tests.
- Continuous Integration: development practices are maintained due to the ability of the tool to support continuous integration.
Eclipse PDT
Eclipse PDT is a highly used Open Source PHP Development Tools is another open source preference without directly costing you.
Eclipse has a massive community of developers working on all sorts of plugins, requisite to authorize Eclipse with features that any other best PHP IDE such as Storms PHP, NetBeans, and Zend studio has to provide.It is a slightly tricky task in the commencement to get underway with Eclipse as contrasted to other business-related IDEs but its use is worth the money it saves for you.
It saves on licenses which are the biggest gain if you ask for an evaluation amid Eclipse PDT and PHPStorm or Zend Studio. If you are an old-time Eclipse follower, you will feel easy to deal with Eclipse PDT.Some people say that Eclipse is sluggish and let me be frank; it is time-consuming when you deal with system configuration while other business-related products relatively perform superior.
However, the fundamental laptop configuration these days it is of high-quality to run Eclipse swift enough to not let you perceive any lags.Some of the essential features comprise syntax highlighting, code formatting, code assist, refactoring, code navigation, code templates, PHP debugging, syntax validation and eclipse ecosystem that possess a vast community which is quite supportive.To start off with, you can download Eclipse package for PHP developers which comes fully to a capacity of PHP language support, Git client, XML Editor, and Mylyn.
Conclusion
No matter what the platform and the language, you’re going to need some kind of software development tool. And when it comes to PHP software development tools, PHP is one of the most common and popular ones in use today.