Phing-a project building system
Phing is an Apache ANT-based project building system. Its name is an acronym for a clumsy statement-phing is not a GNU make. Phing can do anything traditional build systems like GNU make can do without a steep learning curve.
The idea behind Phing (and other building systems) is to evaluate a range 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 substitutions (such as changing the include path 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 an invaluable asset. At the same time I found 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 note, warning, and error messages that are displayed after activation. If a script does not work 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, collect analysis information, and interactively debug scripts. Profiling functionality features are particularly useful. The parser uses a common output file format that allows you to quickly discover bottlenecks in your code using tools like Kcachegrind. For any serious developer, a good parser is the basic tool that allows you to properly optimize your code while avoiding the hazards of premature optimization.
PHPUnit-Unit test Framework
PHPUnit is a lightweight PHP testing framework. It is a full 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 approaches, making phpunit a key tool for many large PHP projects. This tool can also be used by the Xdebug extension discussed earlier to generate code coverage reports, and can be integrated with phing for automated testing.
Propel-orm (Object Relational mapping) framework
Propel is a PHP5 object-relational Mapping (ORM) framework, 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 like normal classes and objects in PHP. Propel allows you to define your database using a simple XML format that is used to map the database and generate static classes used in the application.
Propel is embedded in the popular Symfony PHP framework (and others), which makes the code more flexible, modular, and portable. This project has excellent documentation from the program 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 making backups in order to debug the app. Installing it is usually the first thing I do after installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL on a lamp server. If you're using MySQL and somehow haven't heard about it, install it now.
Other Tools
There are plenty of great tools to meet every need to help PHP developers create a rich development environment-I hope I can talk about all of these tools. I found the tools that worked for me were PHP beautifier, SPYC, Creole and Smarty. I'm sure there are a lot of useful tools I've forgotten or haven't 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!
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