Five PHP programmer tools _php Tips

Phing-a project building system
Phing is a project building system based on Apache ANT. Its name is a clumsy statement acronym-Phing is isn't GNU make. Phing can do traditional building systems such as what GNU make can do, without steep learning curves.

The idea behind Phing (and other build systems) is to evaluate a series of dependencies and then execute a series of PHP classes to properly install and configure an application system. The build process is controlled with a simple XML configuration file. Out of the box, the phing built-in can perform a series of replacements (such as changing include paths between your development version and product version), executing SQL statements, moving and copying files, running external scripts, and so on. You can also create your own custom tasks by extending the "task" class that is included in the release package.

For anyone who needs to deploy a large PHP application on more than one server in the afterlife, Phing is a priceless treasure. And I find it useful for simple PHP scripts as well.

Xdebug-Debugging and analysis tools
Xdebug is a php extension that helps you debug and analyze scripts. The most useful feature in Xdebug is the new attention information, warning messages, and error messages that are displayed after activation. If a script does not function correctly, Xdebug will output a full heap trace of the error message with the function name, parameter value, source file, and line number. This is a welcome feature for programmers who are tired of the poor error reporting functionality that PHP defaults to.

This extension has many more advanced features that allow developers to perform code coverage analysis, gather profiling information, and debug scripts interactively. The Profiling functionality feature is especially useful. The parser uses a common output file format that allows you to quickly discover bottlenecks in your code using tools such as Kcachegrind. A good parser for any serious developer is the basic tool that allows you to properly optimize your code while avoiding the dangers of premature optimization.

PHPUnit-Unit test Framework
PHPUnit is a lightweight PHP testing framework. It is a complete transplant of the JUnit 3.8.1 under PHP5, a member of the Xunit Test framework family (they are based on the design of the software model pioneer Kent Beck).

Unit testing is the foundation of several modern agile development methods, making phpunit a key tool for many large PHP projects. This tool can also be used to generate code coverage reports by the Xdebug extensions discussed earlier, and can be integrated with phing for automated testing.

Propel-orm (Object Relational mapping) framework
Propel is an object-relational mapping (ORM) framework under PHP5, which originates from the Apache torque project. It provides a complex but Easy-to-use database abstraction layer that allows you to use database entities in PHP as you would with normal classes and objects. Propel allows you to define your database using a simple XML format that is used to map databases and generate static classes used in applications.

Propel is embedded in the popular Symfony PHP framework (and others), which makes the code more flexible, modular, and portable. This project has an excellent document for has and a great support community.

phpmyadmin/phppgadmin-web-based database management system
History is a bit long but still useful, phpMyAdmin is one of the most useful management tools for any database (corresponding to PostgreSQL and SQLite are Phppgadmin and phpsqliteadmin). It helps to do everything from creating and deleting databases to doing backups for debugging applications. Installing it is usually the first thing I do after installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on a lamp server. If you use MySQL and somehow haven't heard of it, install it now.

Other Tools
There are a number of good tools to meet the needs of the PHP developers to create a rich development environment-I hope I can talk about all these tools. The tools I found useful for myself were PHP beautifier, SPYC, Creole and Smarty. I am sure there are many useful tools that I have forgotten or never heard of. So if you know a great tool for PHP development that I missed, please leave a message for me (and everyone) to know!