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Sahil Sachdeva
Sahil Sachdeva

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10 Best PHP Development Tools

“Enhance the Quality with PHP Tools”

Certainly, PHP is a robust, fast, classic, and globally used scripting language. However, there are numerous talks about PHP that indicate a lot of big statements like PHP is dead but there are companies that want to hire PHP developers. Moreover, the usage statistics are still drastically increasing and this proves that PHP isn’t yet dead. There are many big companies or brands that use PHP primarily. Furthermore, most developers appreciate the features of PHP as it is a very versatile programming language. Moreover, there are many tools that not just smooth the work but also enhance the whole process and final result. Now, if you’re interested in learning PHP, then you must opt for PHP training to acquire the desired skill set. Before that, let's discover the top 10 PHP development tools today, in this blog.

Best 10 PHP Development Tools

These are the best 10 tools for PHP development:-

1. PHPStorm
2. Zend Studio
3. NuSphere PhpED
4. Netbeans
5. Cloud 9
6. Aptana Studio
7. CodeLobster
8. Sublime Text
9. PHPDebugbar
10. Eclipse

Let’s have a brief look at the best 10 PHP development tools:-

PHPStorm

PHPStorm is a lightweight, fast, and smooth PHP development tool which is perfect for frameworks, such as Zend Framework, Symfony, Yii, Laravel, CakePHP, and CMS such as Drupal, Magento, and WordPress. It allows live editing of major front-end technologies including CSS, HTML5, JavaScript, etc. along with functionality for code refactoring, unit testing, and debugging. Furthermore, it allows developers to link databases, version control systems, remote deployment tools, composers, command-line tools, rest clients, and many other tools.

Zend Studio

The main reason web developers choose Zend Studio is because of its high-quality performance. Composing and debugging code in Zend Studio doesn't require extra effort or time, and it debugs PHP scripts with X-ray, Xdebug, and Zend Debugger. Zend Studio offers an extensive collection of features and is able to make applications available on various servers, including cloud servers. Developers can extend Zend Studio with Eclipse plugins.

NuSphere PhpED

In short, it is a PHP development tool offered by NuSphere that incorporates an advanced PHP editor, such as Visual Studio Code, a PHP Profiler, and a PHP Debugger. The utility provides developers with a wide variety of tools and tweaks that make the whole process of developing a web application faster and easier. It includes a PHP velocity acceleration tool called PhpExpress, which gives developers the ability to accelerate the development of web applications. It offers support for JavaScript, HTML, and CSS3 while offering robust PHP 7.1 support. Its refactoring capabilities enable developers to optimize their code.

Netbeans

With NetBeans, you can write PHP applications with a number of rich features that support multiple interpreters and languages. This tool was originally used for Java applications, but the current version is more lightweight, faster, and supports the service architecture. There are extensions to support other programming languages like C++, C, and HTML5. Multilingual support includes Japanese, Russian, English, Brazilian Portuguese, and simplified Chinese. NetBeans PHP IDE supports almost all PHP frameworks, including Zend, Symfony 2, CakePHP, FuelPHP, Smarty, and WordPress CMS. It offers custom features relevant only to developing PHP web applications with the latest versions.

Cloud 9

One of the benefits of Cloud9, an open-source cloud IDE, is that it supports hundreds of programming languages, including PHP, C++, JavaScript, and Python. A preconfigured environment called workspace allows developers to create web applications quickly and find out whether their web apps will run with browser compatibility testing and live previews. They can collaborate with their colleagues by using collaborative coding features. PHP IDE offers a smooth experience for creating serverless apps. It helps you define resources, execute serverless apps and debug remotely whenever and wherever you like. As Cloud9 allows you to build serverless applications, you can use your browser to code with ease. Moreover, you can share your development environment with your peers so that you can pair code and track real-time input.

Aptana Studio

It's an open-source PHP development tool used in conjunction with various server-side as well as client-side web technologies, including PHP, Python, CSS3, Ruby on Rails, and HTML5. It offers a command-line interface and debugger to support easy development. With SFTP, FTP, and IDE customization, Aptana Studio allows developers to build and test web applications in a single environment. This powerful engine leverages the flexibility of Eclipse and contains information about the extent to which each element functions in the leading browsers. In addition to its high performance, Aptana Studio provides an array of attractive features that enhance productivity.

CodeLobster

In terms of PHP tools, CodeLobster IDE is the most popular one among the developers because it supports the most popular frameworks such as Symfony, Laravel, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Magento, Joomla, and Drupal. The CodeLobster IDE streamlines the development process by automatically implementing all arguments, functions, attributes, and tags. You are no longer required to remember the names of these parameters in HTML, JavaScript, PHP, and CSS. This PHP tool provides a built-in PHP debugger to validate your code locally. Additionally, it automatically detects the setting of the current servers and automatically configures related files to allow you to use the free debugger. It supports Drupal, WordPress, Magento, and Joomla.

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is one of the best text editors for PHP developers out there, but it is not an IDE. Once you add the necessary plugins and packages, it can be used as a suitable editor to develop PHP applications. With its robust features and elegant designs, it is considered the best editor for PHP development by the developer community. This cross-platform text editor supports several programming languages as well as markup languages. With a custom UI toolkit, this text editor can let you quickly change the position of symbols, words, or lines of code. In addition, any line of the code can be changed.

PHPDebugbar

Essentially it is a PHP debugger that can be used with any project and display data from a wide range of web apps. It is composed of two parts, namely: the mainDebugBar object and data collectors, and the render. In addition to PHP, PHPDebugbar also catches JavaScript and HTML bugs, as well as CSS elements, the network, and JavaScript code. By providing more features than developers expect, PHPDebugbar becomes an impressive open-source tool. It is the perfect solution for profiling data from any web application. It can be customized for your own collection that allows the easiest integration.

Eclipse

The majority of your digital results for the top PHP tools will contain Eclipse as a top contender. Being a complete development tool, it is often ranked as one of the best PHP tools. In addition to its powerful plugin system, a broad range of plugins allows you to easily develop and simplify PHP code as well as customize and extend it to meet your specific project needs. An ideal PHP editor for large-scale PHP projects, this PHP IDE can support both GUI and non-GUI applications.

The End

Every web development company utilizes these PHP development tools to deliver world-class level quality work to clients. To upscale your work quality, start using these tools now and enjoy great perks.

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