Ten amazing coding tools worthy of your attention for PHP developers
When we often have to deal with boring and repetitive tasks such as manual code testing and deployment, we often feel frustrated, but we have always tried to be efficient.
And this article will introduce you to 10 PHP development tools, they can just help you meet that requirement, so you can have more time to focus on building better web pages.
1 . PHPUnit
Testing is a very important part of software development, but many developers only give very little time to test, because this work is indeed time-consuming, boring and error-prone.
In order to solve the above problems, automated testing tools allow developers to write a series of test scripts, these scripts can be easily executed, and can be executed according to scheduled tasks.
These automated testing tools usually provide test reports, which describe the results of each test in detail. PHP developers have a pretty good testing framework PHPUNIT in terms of automatic testing.
Based on very popular test-driven development methods, such as xUnit, PHPUNIT allows developers to use PHP syntax to write test cases, and then use a very simple command line tool to execute the test. You can even integrate PHPUNIT with some continuous integration tools such as phpUnderControl.
2. Phing
As WEB development projects become more and more complex, developers are faced with a lot of deployment tasks. These tasks are not just as simple as transferring files from the developer's machine to the production server.
For example, avoid uploading files in the development environment, such as picture templates, handle the authority and parameter configuration of the specified files on the server, such as user name and password, and how to recover as soon as possible when a change error occurs. These problems are often encountered by developers.
In order to solve these problems, the developer uses a special build tool, which can make the file transfer process more efficient, because it only transfers changed files synchronously. The build tool can also be easily customized according to the deployment environment.
3. GitHub
Version control can bring many benefits to the project, including the ability to build experimental branches of the code, roll back unnecessary changes, check which team members have changed a file recently, and monitor progress through logs. Although there are many open source version control tools, Git is currently my favorite.
The rise of Git is largely due to a GitHub website that provides third-party hosting services, which provides developers with a series of hosting services. GitHub meets the needs of developers and even provides hosting services for open source projects. Now that there are more than one million hosted applications on it, GitHub provides developers with extremely valuable services, so that they don't have to spend a lot of money and time to find third-party hosting services.
4. FirePHP
Many developers are very familiar with the FireFox plug-in Firebug, which allows you to easily check the syntax of a web page's HTML, CSS and Javascript. Using FirePHP, you can also use an interface like FireBug to check PHP syntax errors and selected analysis data.
5. XDebug
After using a testing tool like PHPUNIT, it can help catch errors after you write the code. On the other hand, sometimes you need to use some help tools to help understand the causes of these problems. Many PHP developers use a good debugging tool XDebug, which can help you check the status of the code, and provide tools to track and analyze code performance, view object content and other functions.
6. PHP extensions and application libraries
Although you may think that your idea is unique and special, there is still a good chance that the code you are working on has already been written by many other programmers. To help developers overcome such obstacles, PHP developers regularly contribute PHP extensions and application libraries, such as the famous PEAR.
PEAR contains 560 packages, which can provide quick solutions such as caching, encryption, user authentication, and payment processing. You can always find a solution that suits you in PEAR.
To help manage PEAR package applications, you can install the PEAR package management tool, which provides a command-line interface to install, upgrade, and delete packages.
PEAR package manager: Getting and installing the PEAR package manager
7. PHP_CodeSniffer
Just like the debate about editors, the debate about coding style is more ironic. Even so, the coding standards advocated by PEAR seem to have gained a place in the PHP community. However, you or your team may still not adopt such standard conventions, which will lead to inconsistent code.
In order to avoid the inconsistency of the code style, you can consider installing PHP_CodeSniffer, it is a very good PEAR package, it can analyze PHP programs, JAVASCRIP and CSS files and check out which ones are contrary to the defined code style. Although you can define your own coding style, the coding style of PHP_CodeSniffer is very convenient.
8. phpDocumentor
It is a frustrating task to understand code from obscure code comments, even if the code was written by yourself before. Just like testing, writing documentation is still one of several tasks that developers hope to avoid. To alleviate this pain, consider using an automatic documentation tool like phpDocumentor. phpDocumentor supports simple document rule grammar, can parse your code and generate friendly documents.
9. PHP_Beautifier
Another factor that hinders reading code is bad code format, because in scripting languages like PHP, it is easy to cause inappropriate indentation and form bad code format. You can use the package PHP_Beautifier in PEAR to format the code automatically.
10. phpUnderControl
If you are considering the tools mentioned above, then you can download the phpUnderControl tool, which is built on CruiseControl. phpUnderControl includes multiple PHP tools, such as phpunit, phpdocumentor, and provides a unified interface management.
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