In PHP Posted April 26th, 2021
Libraries give out of the box functionality that you can use for development of various applications. PHP is one of the most popular languages for Web development and part of the reason for that is its good collection of libraries and frameworks.
Contrary to what many people might believe, PHP is still not dead and is being actively used by many people for a variety of reasons. So, it is still worth it to be knowledgeable regarding PHP.
Assertions are common in many languages and they can be used to test the both inputs and outputs of functions easily. Basically, assert statements take certain test conditions to assert, and only after the statement is true, the execution goes to the next statement, otherwise, an error is shown with fine details. Assert library has some built in messages but you can customize them for your requirements.
Mink is a library which helps you in keeping an eye on web apps and check if all the interaction happening between your web apps and browser are in a properway. A great thing with Mink is that it eliminates all the API differences that come with different browsers and manages that for you. This makes mink a better testing environment.
Hoa is a set of PHP libraries that recommends essential paradigms, algorithms and mechanisms that ensure the reliability of the websites. It is a modular, structured and extensible set of libraries that aims to bridge between the worlds of industrial and research.
The libraries that Hoa consist include: Acl, Compiler, Consistency, Console, Graph and more.
Symfony is a collection of many components that aid many aspects of developing web apps with PHP. There are about 50 components to choose from! Just take them from the library and you are good to go.
Some of the components of Symfony include: BrowserKit for simulation of the behaviour of web browsers, Translation which aids in developing multilingual sites and Process which performs command execution in sub-processes.
PChart contains a lot of useful tools for Data Visualization which is very important these days. With this library, you can represent data in the form of pie charts, bar charts and many other visualization schemes. It provides an OOP syntax and adheres to all the new web standards.
Swiftmailer is a library that provides a great deal of help in mailing operations of your web app. It provides multiple features in sending emails. Swiftmailer provides security features too. It can protect the emails from header injection attacks without even removing the request data content which is very handy!
Ratchet is highly useful if you are developing real-time, two-directional apps between clients and servers over Websockets. Instead of traditional HTTP requests, Ratchet library helps you to create event driven apps in a rapid and simple way.
Documentation is important for any software project. phpDocumentor is an auto documentation tool that helps you generate detailed documentation using PHP code. It supports full text search even offline! Not only that, PHPDocumentor can give you UML class diagrams for your project.
Email Validator library providers a slew of features that help you in validating emails in various schemes. They include: RFC validation, Spoof Check Validation, No RFC Warning Validation, DNS validation and more.
Many times you can test out various features of your application when you have large data. Faker is the PHP library that helps in creating fake dummy data whenever you require it. You can just fill the entire database with mock data or create certain sample XML documents with it.
The AWS SDK library allows developers to use Amazon Web Services technology in PHP web apps. Using the library, you can build web apps that can use amazon cloud services like Dynamo Databases, S3 and more. All the amazon services are preconfigured in the library and are ready for deployment!
It is a handy library that helps you in exporting environment variables from .env to getenv(). $_ENV and $_SERVER. It supports multi line variables too. With this library, users have the flexibility of choosing which segment of the environment variables to read and modify!
So those are our top 12 picks for the PHP libraries for developing web apps. Use them and speed up your PHP development!
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