10 Productivity-boosting Tools for Your PHP Development

"Frustration can quickly set in when you are dealing with menial and often repetitive tasks such as manual code testing and deployment, yet you strive to become a more efficient programmer by staying DRY. So why not extend that quest to other parts of the application lifecycle, streamlining and automating such tasks? In this article I'll introduce you to ten PHP development tools that will help you do exactly that, leaving you with more time to concentrate on building great websites.

"1. PHPUnit

"Testing is a crucial part of the application development process, yet many developers give it short shrift because the task can be enormously time-consuming, plodding and error prone. To combat these issues, automated testing tools give developers the ability to write a series of testing scripts, which can be easily executed on a whim or even according to a predefined schedule. These tools also often provide a reporting feature, which details the outcome of each test run.

"PHP developers have long had a great automated testing framework at their disposal known as PHPUnit. Based on the popular code-driven approach to testing known as xUnit, PHPUnit allows developers to actually write tests using familiar PHP syntax, and then execute these tests using a simple command-line utility. You can even integrate PHPUnit into continuous integration tools such as phpUnderControl (discussed further later in this article)."

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• 10 Experimental PHP Projects Pushing the Envelope(Jul 31, 2010)
• The PHP Content Management/Framework Upgrades in ExpressionEngine 2(Jul 30, 2010)
• Elevate Your PHP Development with PHP 5.3's Powerful New Features(Apr 01, 2010)
• The Basics of SQL Joins in MySQL(Mar 30, 2010)
• Five Indispensable MySQL Tools(Mar 08, 2010)
• Secrets of the MySQL Client Command Line(Feb 06, 2008)