PHP is indeed a powerful scripting language that is popular amongst developers worldwide. It comes with many PHP libraries that allow it to perform development at a great efficiency; maybe that’s what contributes to its prominence.
PHP was launched in 1994 by Rasmus Ledford, who invented it to monitor the traffic on his personal resume. Therefore, PHP stood for “Personal Home Page.”
However, as time evolved digitally, PHP was integrated with significant modifications and the best PHP libraries that allowed it to perform complex web development conveniently.
Currently, it stands for “Hypertext Processor” and is used by many esteemed companies such as Etsy, Facebook, Wikipedia, Tumblr, WordPress, Slack, and many more.
We may fall short of words in praising the brilliant technology since its qualities may never actually come to an end. The endless possibilities the server-side scripting language provides to its developers is the primary reason behind developers’ robust community who have associated their name with it.
What makes PHP web development preferred?
As we have mentioned repeatedly, PHP has managed to gain its spot in the most promising scripting languages or modern times for web and app development, but why is that? What makes that happen?
Well, it’s the simplicity, development-friendly functionalities, and the easy web structure that credits it to become one of the most liked languages.
It is possible to create dynamic and highly interactive websites or applications by using PHP website development techniques to obtain the desired results.
However, coding is not a cakewalk; it can be a tedious and challenging task to accomplish. This is exactly why PHP offers built-in libraries that optimize the entire coding process, making it highly productive.
What are PHP libraries?
This is exactly what we aim to discuss in this article. In this write-up, you will get to know the 20 most top libraries capable of leveraging the web and app development process to the next level.
Let’s move ahead and learn about the Best PHP libraries in detail:
Mink:
Mink is one of the most prominent PHP libraries on the list. It allows you to monitor the interaction happening between the browser and your web application. Mink eliminates the API differences between two types of browsers while offering an authentic testing environment to carry out your perfect PHP web development. It can also support various PHP frameworks such as PHPUnit and Symphony.
PChart:
PChart is another excellent PHP library that helps assist the generation of text data via what appeals to the eyes to the most extent, meaning, it uses visual charts.
This library can be used to represent the data of your website via attractive elements such as pie charts, bar graphs, and many other exciting formats.
The PHP script in this particular library uses the SQL queries to integrate the data into impressing elements.
Hoa:
Hoa is an extensible, modular, and structured set of PHP libraries that establish a link between the industry and the research.
It also recommends necessary algorithms, paradigms, and mechanisms for developing a reliable website. Many developers worldwide prefer using Hoa to master PHP website development for their clients or their own businesses.
Monolog:
If you wish to save logs without much of a hassle, Monolog is here to serve! The incredible library can save logs in specific locations by moving them to set files, inboxes, sockets, databases, and other web services.
By using the PSR-3 interface, a developer can type-hint logs to counter the libraries maintaining optimum interoperability.
Ratchet:
Ratchet is one of those PHP libraries that can effectively develop real-time, two-directional applications that run between the servers and clients over WebSockets.
Thus, the development of event-driven applications with Ratchet is simple, quick, and as easy as a breeze.
Guzzle:
Guzzle makes it easy for you to send the HTTP requests to amalgamate with web services. Thus, it is one of the most liked HTTP client libraries.
It provides a simple interface making the development of POST requests, query strings, HTTP cookies, and many other attributes possible with convenience.
It can also be used to send both synchronous as well as asynchronous requests using a similar interface.
Geocoder
If you wish to create geo-aware applications. The Geocoder PHP library allows adding layers of abstractions that help manipulate the geocode.
It further splits up into two parts, namely, Provider and HttpAdapter.
PhpThumb:
PhpThumb is a specialized library that handles the work related to creating thumbnails without having to code much. It accepts every image format, and the image source type allows you to range from cropping to rotation or watermarking to determine and define the quality of the image.
Read More: Best PHP Development Tools
ImageWorkshop
It is a popular PHP image library that is open source and facilitates brilliant PHP web development by allowing a developer to manipulate images with layers. ImageWorkshop allows one to add watermarks, resize, crop, create thumbnails and do much more using it. It is also possible for them to enhance the images present on the website.
Parody:
Parody is a simple PHP library actively used by developers to copy classes and objects. It is also responsible for providing results for method calls, instantiating objects, acquiring properties, etc.
Parody uses sequential method chaining to define the class structures.
PhpFastCache:
PhpFastCache leverages PHP website development by offering its robust set of features. It is an open-sourced library that can easily make the caching process feasible. What’s more, is the fact that it can be integrated in a few minutes as it comes as a single file.
It supports caching methods such as Memcached, APC, Memcache, pdo, wincache, and mpdo.
Imagine:
Imagine is an object-oriented PHP image library that works with images and also manipulates them. It makes operations like cropping, resizing, and integrating filters a process that’s easy, convenient, and rapid.
Imagine allows you to use the color class required to form the RGB value of any provided color. You can also draw shapes such as an ellipse, arcs, line, etc., with the many available features.
PHP CPP Libraries:
The PHP CPP library is used for developing PHP extensions and is a C++ library. It provides a collection of easy-to-use and well-documented classes that can be utilized and extended to create native PHP extensions. In simple words, PHP CPP is a fun way to develop PHP extensions.
Faker:
Faker is another excellent PHP library that can be used to generate dummy content for the website. It provides data for all sorts of tasks; you can bootstrap your database, develop aesthetically pleasing XML documents, anonymize the data acquired from a production service, and fill in your persistence to stress test your documents. If you need to do anything like that, Faker is what you need.
Munee:
Munee is known as a PHP library that has it all. It is an all-in-one library that can handle several things at one time, be it tasks related to manipulation or optimization of a website asset; it can efficiently manage it. The library comes with a robot caching feature that caches data on both servers and the client-side. It also integrates perfectly with the image manipulation library of PHP.
Opauth:
Opauth is an excellent PHP library that is open-sourced in nature. It bridges the gap between providers and offers a more aligned method to deal with them. Currently, three providers hold the “plug and play’ badge, namely, Twitter, Facebook, and Google (hopefully, more will be joining). Also, the library provides support to deal with other Opauth providers.
Whoops:
Whoops enjoys its fame as one of the best error-handling libraries for PHP. Apart from this, it offers a beautiful error interface that allows a developer to debug web projects. However, it is still, at heart, a simple and robustly stacked error handling system.
Alice:
Alice is one of the best PHP libraries that allows you to create a massive load of fake data while building or testing a project. It provides some great tools that make it easy to generate complicated data in an easy to edit and readable manner. Every member of your team can pinpoint the needed fixtures.
PHP Password Lib:
PHP PasswordLib is a cryptographic library that can serve almost every cryptographic need. It is developed in a way that makes it easy to use and easy to install. However, it is still one of the most potent and extensible PHP libraries that the most experienced developers often use.
Stash:
Stash allows the developer to speed up the code via caching the results of expensive codes or functions. Some actions, such as calls to external APIs and database queries, take substantial time to run. However, they tend to show the same results over a short period. This makes the library more efficient to store the results and call them up whenever required.
Conclusion:
Libraries hold extreme importance when it comes to mastering PHP web development. Therefore, it does not matter what project you are planning to build; you would have to choose a suitable library and the best PHP developers for hire for anything you go with.
Therefore, holding relevant knowledge of the options you have is essential to make an informed choice because nothing you do should jeopardize your project.
