S.M. – 50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine

Posted by mdrisser on 2009/01/21 under Development, PHP | Read the First Comment

Smashing Magazine has an article that is squarely aimed at those of us who are web developers, more specifically, PHP developers.

50 Extremely Useful PHP Tools | Developer’s Toolbox | Smashing Magazine.

A couple of these tools I use, or have used, but a great many of them I haven’t used and some I’ve never even heard of.

The ones I’ve used are mostly extensions/classes for the language, although I have used a few of the others mentioned as well. Here’s the ones I’ve used.

• Simple Pie (RSS/ATOM Library)
• phpDocumentor (Pretty self explanatory)
• xajax (Easy AJAX with PHP)
• CodeIgniter (PHP Framework)
• Zend Framework (Another PHP Framework)
• CakePHP (Still another PHP Framework)
• PHPEclipse (Really just an Eclipse IDE)
• Aptana PHP (Another Eclipse IDE)
• FirePHP (A great addition to the FireBug extension for FireFox)

A few of the IDEs listed I might look into, if they are available for the Mac

The debuggers really hold the most interest to me. I still do my debugging the old-fashioned way, var_dump(), print_r(), echo(), a lot of head stractching and ‘Why isn’t this working?’ type of thing.

I’ll try out some of these tools and let you know how they work out for me.