Every PHP developer has an arsenal of tools in their tool box that they use to get the best out of productivity, efficiency, security and performance. Today we look at the most useful PHP tools on the market!

PHP Tools for optimizing and performance:

SimpleTest – Unit testing for PHP

SimpleTest does exactly what it says on the tin, a simple, yet effective tool for testing out your worthy PHP applications. It has support for SSL, forms, frames, proxies and basic authentication. Many tasks such as logging into a site can be tested easily..

Site: simpletest.org

PHP Profile Class

PHP profile class allows you to find bottlenecks in your application and discover areas that would benefit from optimization

Site: coderholic.com/php-profile-class

PHP Debugging Tools

Xdebug9

Xdebug is a great PHP extension which aids the programmer in quickly finding all those nasty bugs in your source code. Xdebug can also be used directly with other popular PHP applications such as PHP Eclipse.

Site: xdebug.org/index.php

PHP_Debug

PHP_Debug an open-source project that provides you with useful and interesting data regarding your PHP code that can late rbe used to determine which areas of your code need debugging.

Site: php-debug.com

PHP Security Tools

Pixy: PHP Security Scanner

This usefll security scanner is a program powered by Java that carries out automatic tasks of scanning PHP  source code, aimed to detect XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities.

Site: blog.evaria.com/2007/pixy-the-php-security-scanner

PHP-IDS

PHP-IDS (PHP-Intrusion Detection System) is a robust, user friendly high-end  security layer for your PHP applications.

Site: php-ids.org

PHP Image Editors and Charts/Graphs

WideImage

WideImage is a PHP library for dynamic image manipulation and processing for PHP 5. In order to use this library, you ought have the GD PHP extension installed on your server.

Site: wideimage.sourceforge.net/wiki/MainPage

PHP/SWF Charts

This a powerful PHP tool empowers you to create eye catching web charts and graphs from dynamic data. You can use PHP scripts to generate and retrieve data from databases, then pass it on to this php tool to create Flash charts and graphs.

Site: maani.us/charts4

PHP Code Enhancers

PHP_Beautifier

This tool comprises of a PEAR package that automatically formats and beautifies PHP 4 and PHP 5 source code.

Site: pear.php.net/package/PHP_Beautifier

GeSHi – Generic Syntax Highlighter

GeSHi was created to become a user friendly but impressive highlighting class, with an aim of supporting a vast amount of the popular languages. Developers can easily plug-in additional languages for highlighting and define easily customizable output formats.

Site: qbnz.com/highlighter/

PHP Documentation Tools

phpDoc

A documentation tool for PHP source code. PHPDoc has a vast amount of features, including the ability to output in PDF, HTML, XML and CHM DocBook formats, and has both a Web-based and command-line interface as well as source-code highlighting.

Site: phpdoc.org

PHP DOX

PHP Doc is an AJAX powered documentation search tool where you can search titles from all PHP documentation pages. Search the PHP documentation tree names, and also browse through the tree.

Site: phpdox.net