Software is usually the unsung hero of software development. While we may spend our time fawning over the latest framework release, we often forget about the main building blocks — our tools — and how important they are to our workflow and the quality of our final product. The neglect extends beyond just us though: since these tools aren’t open source or free, they’re not always given much hype.
When you’re a programmer, you know that the tools you use matter. The better your tools, the easier it is to build what you want.
Eclipse
Eclipse is coming first as it’s one of the most used tools for PHP development. Because it is a completely developed tool, it is the most commonly utilized IDE (integrated development environment) that provides PHP. The great thing about this tool is that it supports some of the most widely used operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux.Several of the tools offered by Eclipse make it simpler to develop and simplify complex PHP applications. Using Eclipse, you have the freedom to choose from a wide variety of plugins. It also supports GUI applications and non-GUI applications. Eclipse as a PHP tool enables users to use some specific plugins that can be used to extend the IDE and adapt it to the project’s requirements.
PHPStorm
Lightweight, extremely fast and smooth, PHPStorm is a standard choice for PHP development tools. This PHP IDE works well with PHP frameworks like Zend Framework, Symfony, Yii, Laravel, and CakePHP and with popular Content Management Systems (CMS) like Drupal, Magento, and WordPress. This IDE provides live editing support for major frontend technologies, such as CSS, HTML5, and JavaScript, in addition to code refactoring, unit testing, and debugging. It also empowers developers to integrate with databases, version control systems, remote deployment, composer, command line tools, and rest client.
PHPStorm Features:
- Code completion.
- Code re-arranger.
- Zero Configuration Debugging.
- Native ZenCoding support.
- Supports extension with plenty of useful plugins like VimEditor.
PHPStorm Specialties:
- Languages supported: PHP, JavaScript, Visual Basic, C, C++, and C#.
- Platforms supported: Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Aptana Studio
Aptana Studio is an open-source PHP tool that can be used in combination with many clients and server-side web technologies. Several of these technologies include PHP, Python, CSS3, Ruby on Rails, Ruby, and HTML5. It works with debuggers and a command-line interface to simplify the development of PHP applications. It enables PHP programmers to create and test web applications in a single environment. It features SFTP, FTP, and IDE settings.This powerful web development engine takes advantage of the flexibility of Eclipse and contains details about the level of support for each element in leading web browsers. Aptana Studio is a powerful PHP IDE and has a multitude of attractive functions to enhance your productivity.
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a multifunctional text editor that features a custom User Interface toolkit. The excellent text editor is created to help you write code, markup, and prose using a powerful built-in command-line palette. The platform provides various shortcuts for developers, allowing them to quickly browse files, jump to lines, words, or icons. Using Sublime, developers can edit or change multiple codes simultaneously. The platform is compatible with several language grammars and allows developers to edit at the same time. Sublime is one of the most widely used text editors for PHP developers; it can be faster and straightforward to use.
Code Lobster
If you are looking for a portable IDE, then Code Lobster is a perfect choice. It provides powerful support for several popular PHP frameworks and even CMS. The best CMS frameworks include CakePHP, Drupal, Joomla, Symfony, CodeIgniter, WordPress, and Magento. Using Code Lobster, programmers can now use PHP to write custom web applications and include valuable features like auto-completion, syntax highlighting, debugger, SQL manager, code validator, etc. PHP developers can now use various advanced features when they upgrade to the professional version.
phpDesigner
A lightweight PHP editor and IDE which can handle front-end code and markup extremely well. Check You can check phpDesigner online tutorials and screencasts on phpDesigner to help you learn more about the IDE.
phpDocumentor
Known as phpdoc and phpdocu, phpDocumentor is a documentation tool for your PHP source code with a countless amount of features like 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.
NuSphere
Here is another company that develops the best PHP tools to enhance the web development experience, and the IDE they create is the PHPED. It supports the latest version of the PHP editor, which supports PHP 7 and many other old and new PHP frameworks, including Laravel, Yii, and Symfony, and almost any content management system (CMS), such as WordPress and Joomla. What is new in the latest version is performing unit tests for local and remote projects.In short, NuSphere PHPED IDE is a package web development tool that supports JavaScript debugging, CSS preprocessing with the LESS preprocessor, HTML5, and anything else in PHP.
Zend Studio
Zend Studio has become many people’s favorite PHP tool because of its unparalleled speed compared to other PHP development tools. With Zend Studio, programmers and developers can take advantage of the flexibility to write and debug code without spending extra time or effort to achieve this goal. Using Zend Studio, it is easy for developers to organize PHP applications across multiple servers. Zend Studio is designed to support PHP 7.It is also possible to debug code in integration with Zend Debuggers, X-Debug, and X-Ray. In addition, there is the possibility of integration using Eclipse plugins for the Zend Studio extension.
Selenium
One of the most popular testing tools available today, Selenium Remote Control (RC) allows you to write automated Web application UI tests in any programming language against any HTTP website by putting to use any mainstream JavaScript-enabled browser. One can use it in conjunction with PHPUnit and create and run automated tests within a Web browser.
SimpleTest
This is a neat and straightforward unit-testing platform for PHP applications. You can read through the easily available tutorial to get up and running with SimpleTest quickly; it will help you to create a new test case.
MacGDBp
This is a live PHP debugger application for the Mac OS. You will get all the features you’d expect from a fully-featured debugger. It has features like the ability to step through your code and set breakpoints.
PHP_Debug
An open-source project that provides useful information about the PHP code which can be used for debugging. PHP_Debug can output processing times of your PHP and SQL, check the performance of particular code blocks, and get variable dumps in graphical form. This can be really helpful if you need a more visual output than the one given to you by print_r() or var_dump().
ScriptCase
The ScriptCase.net tool enables developers to instantly develop web-enabled applications. These applications leverage connections to databases and report generation. The underlying software allows you to go from prototype to production in a matter of seconds. This tool is geared for a mid-sized company; better for a Laravel or Codeigniter development company to rapidly scale their applications.
Eclipse PDT
Eclipse started as an IDE but has become so much more than that today in terms of functionalities. It was created for developers working in Java code. The tool has now got extended to include other languages like PHP. Even though Eclipse is an open-source tool, it can become a sort of overkill for startup companies. The tool uses a considerable amount of computing resources which could be limited for smaller companies.
Zend Studio
No list is complete without the mention of Zend Studio, an IDE that takes PHP development to the next level. It contains a sophisticated set of features and can deploy to any server including servers in the cloud. The tool has been optimized for PHP 7, making it faster than previous versions. Companies of any size would find Zend Studio helpful.
Retrace
A tool that goes above and beyond in terms of standard Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to provide developers all the tools they need in one easy to use solution. Retrace initially supported only Java and .NET, and has started supporting PHP. It has an enhanced log and error tracking feature which makes it stand out from the rest. The tool is significantly cost-effective and is best for teams to diagnose, improve, and accelerate application performance.
Scavenger
A powerful open-source, real-time vulnerability management tool that helps system administrators take action on vulnerability findings, track vulnerability findings, and review accepted and false-positive answered vulnerabilities. It doesn’t bother them with old vulnerabilities.
Xinc
This is a continuous integration server version-control system written in PHP 5. It has continuous builds in place of nightly builds. Xinc works seamlessly with other systems like Subversion and Phing.
Minify
With Minify you can combine multiple CSS or JavaScript files, compress their content like removing unnecessary white space and comments, and easily serve the results with HTTP encoding with the help of Gzip/deflate and headers that allow optimal client-side caching.
Conclusion
This is a collection of the best PHP development tools, IDE’s and web applications. I have included some basic information about each tool making it easier for you to choose which one to use.