One of the fastest growing programming languages, PHP, has had a strong foundation and is unshakeable today. The fandom behind PHP is huge and the language deserves it. Numbers say it easily that a majority of websites today are built on PHP.

Even the WordPress website you will build so easily, runs PHP on the backend. The demand for this language has been phenomenal and there are various reasons behind it. The ease of use, the available tools, and the mature framework of this language is what makes it so popular.

Here are some of the most prominent features of PHP: 
 

The programming language was made for web and that philosophy is still going strong. It becomes smooth for developers to create websites in PHP and it contains a huge range of useful web-related functions at its core.

PHP is supremely fast. The latest version of PHP is two times faster than its predecessors. PHP beats Python and Ruby in terms of speed.

The community of PHP is gigantic, and this pertains to its popularity. This makes it easy for programmers to find a huge number of reliable resources online and can know in which direction to look when things feel stuck.

Development in PHP becomes a breeze when there are supporting tools and frameworks available readily. These tools have been designed to make the language provide more reliable and rapid output. Most of these tools are loved by developers worldwide and are extremely sophisticated in aiding the language.

Selenium

Selenium is one of the more popular automation testing frameworks which is majorly used for cross browser testing. A great advantage is that it is open source and is ideal for automating testing of web applications across different browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, etc.

For testers, the scripts written using Selenium WebDriver supports browser compatibility testing. This makes it possible for a tester to run multiple testing scenarios with WebDriver covering every functionality testing aspects. Also, one more benefit of automation testing with Selenium WebDriver is that is leverages the advantage of speeding up the test cycles by scaling the development code. Testers can use the language used by developers in this case.

Sublime Text
 

Sublime text has a huge number of raving fans across the internet. The words “best code editor ever” are regularly found online when asked about it. It is more of a PHP code editor; one of the best for that matter. Sublime has better-organized menus and a better default theme, including that neat scrollbar. 

The text editor is rapid when it comes to editing or maintaining a code. Plus, Sublime Text 2 has some neat features like multi cursor input, multiple selections etc which makes you immensely productive as a developer.

Zend Studio
 

Zend Studio, is yet another  leading PHP editor allowing developers to build high-quality PHP web and mobile applications. It is basically a PHP integrated development environment which has helped increase the productivity of web and mobile app developers by allowing them to code faster, debug much easier, and maximize the gains from PHP7. 

You will find that the level of customization it provides is simply amazing. It lays down a plethora of capabilities and options in front of developers. Zend is a highly result-oriented PHP framework supporting inheritance and reusability thoughts of OOPS for well-administered and tailored web application development.

Codeigniter
 

To put simply, CodeIgniter is a mighty and jacked PHP framework that has a very small footprint. When you hire Codeigniter expert, he can build powerful full-featured web applications with this simple and elegant toolkit.

Codeigniter is stable, mature, and supremely lightweight. The MVC is useful and has easy to understand coding patterns. The Active Record pattern in Codeigniter makes it a breeze for developers to run programs. It also contains built-in libraries and resources which can help you create a web application with high-end functionalities.

  
XDebug
 

Xdebug is an extension of PHP that helps developers in debugging and smooth development of their projects. It allows them to closely and carefully watch for errors and solve them on the spot. It upgrades PHP’s var_dump() function. It also adds stack traces for Notices, Warnings, Errors and Exceptions.

Xdebug allows developers to integrate breakpoints and stop the code execution at every breakpoint, so that they can see variables output in only one iteration of code. This saves the precious time which will  be otherwise lost in code debugging. Without Xdebug, one has to refresh the page to see the output again. Developers can also set breakpoints in dependent methods to analyze which one is causing issues. Lastly, one can add as many breakpoints as one wants in the code, and then use PHP debugger to check each code line by line.

Conclusion

Framework and tools are developed by companies or communities for the purpose of greater good. Heavy and long-term development with a programming language exposes you to issues and roadblocks which need confrontation. This is when such wonderful frameworks and tools are developed, solving the issue once and for all.