6 Developement Tools a PHP Developer Should Know

PHP is the most popular web development language currently. At least 20 million domains use PHP since 2012 and over 80% 0f the server-side programming languages it’s the language for websites used PHP. Major sites such as Facebook and Baidu as well as some of the world’s biggest open source projects like WordPress and Drupal use PHP.

Years ago, all you needed to be a developer was an editor, a compiler, and hopefully some kind of revision control system. Unfortunately, many developers still don’t use revision control systems properly.

Editor/IDE

PHPStorm is an awesome super tool. It’s from JetBrains and can also integrate with the other tools. PhpStorm works with frameworks like Drupal, WordPress, Laravel, Magento, CakePHP, and the list goes on… You can also carry out routine tasks right with it and it is also able to offer you code completion, error prevention, and more to help you code efficiently and productively.

PHPframework

ZenTaoPHP is the primary development framework by EasySoft INC., the core of which is four files, router.class.php, control.class.php, model.class.php, and helper.class.php namely. The framework is simple, with a clear structure, and it is very convenient to maintain. It is also user friendly, such as nomenclature, configuration objectification, and relative paths etc. ZenTao PHP can be deep extended.

Continuous Integration

Jenkins is an open source automation server written in Java. Jenkins helps to automate the non-human part of software development process, with continuous integration and facilitating technical aspects of continuous delivery.

Merge Tool

There are a lot of merge tool and diff tools. WinMerge is an Open Source differentiating and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle.

Version Control

Git and SVN are the two popular version control tools. Git is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people. Apache Subversion is a software versioning and revision control system distributed as open source under the Apache License. These two can also be integrated into ZenTao, an open source project management tool. It is very handy to do version control with in ZenTao and manage development projects at the same time.

Developer Support

Bug tracking can never be left out in developing. Redmine is among the free tools. However, you should not miss ZenTao, if you want more out of your support tool, such as product management. For more features of ZenTao, please refer to ZenTao Features.

Reference

1. http://php.net/usage.php

2. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language