PHP is a server-side scripting language designed for web development but also used as a general-purpose programming language. Originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, the PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group.
Backend PHP development is still one of the most popular choices for creating dynamic websites. Frontend web development uses a whole different set of skills to construct a website layout. But PHP tackles everything from form submissions to database queries. WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, and many other CMS engines are built on PHP.
In this post I have compiled a list of 25 Best PHP Libraries that will serve myriad of purpose for you such as image manipulation, sending HTTP requests, security management, error handling and many other tasks.
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PHP Image Manipulation Libraries
Here is the list of the best PHP Image Manipulation Libraries and Class to assist you to simplify your tasks.
1. Zebra Image
Zebra_Image is an open source and lightweight image manipulation library built with PHP. With this library you can resize, flip, rotate , crop and sharpen images. All sort of filters can also be applied to images: negate, grayscale, brightness, contrast, colorize, edgedetect, emboss, gaussian blur, selective blur, mean removal, smooth and pixelate; multiple filters can be applied at once for creating custom filters; It supports loading and saving images in the GIF, JPEG and PNGformats and preserves transparency of GIF, PNG8 and PNG24 images.
2. Imagine
Imagine is a OOP library for image manipulation built in PHP 5.3 using the latest best practices and thoughtful design that should allow for decoupled and unit-testable code.
3. PHP5 Image Manipulation
PHP5 Image is a full object-oriented library for an image manipulation by PHP and GD2. It is an extended version of php-image project and can be used either standalone or inside Zend Framework projects.
4. phpThumb
phpThumb is a PHP library that handles all the hard work on creating thumbnails with only few lines of code. It accepts any source types for images (from the filesystem, URL or database) and all popular image formats.
5. WideImage
Wide Image is an object-oriented library for image manipulation. It requires PHP 5.2+ with GD2 extension. The library provides a simple way to loading, manipulation and saving images in the most common image formats.
PHP Libraries for Sending HTTP Requests
HTTP is the protocol that allows for sending documents back and forth on the web, let’s check out some of the best php libraries for sending http requests.
6. Unirest
Unirest is a pack of lightweight HTTP libraries for many languages (PHP, Ruby, Python, Java And Objective-C). It has support for GET, POST, PUT, UPDATE, DELETE operations and its methods + response structure are the same in all languages.
7. Requests
Requests is a stable PHP library that uses cURL or fsockopen (depending on the availability) and provides a consistent API. Requests allows you to send HEAD, GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and PATCH HTTP requests.
8. Guzzle 6
It is one of the popular library for working with http requests. Guzzle 6 is a PHP HTTP client that makes it easy to send HTTP requests and trivial to integrate with web services. Guzzle will use the PHP stream wrapper to send HTTP requests if cURL is not installed. Alternatively, you can provide your own HTTP handler used to send requests.
9. Httpful
Httpful is a simple Http Client library for PHP 5.3+. There is an emphasis of readability, simplicity, and flexibility – basically provide the features and flexibility to get the job done and make those features really easy to use.
10. httpClient
PHP Http Client is a fully featured HTTP client created 100% in PHP. It doesn’t use cURL or other external libraries.
Php Security Libraries
Here is the collection of best php Security Libraries that will help them to create security interfaces for web applications.
11. PHP Password Lib
PHP-PasswordLib aims to be an all-inclusive cryptographic library for all cryptographic needs. It is meant to be easy to install and use, yet extensible and powerful enough for even the most experienced developer.
12. PHP SecLib
phpseclib is designed to be ultra-compatible. It works on PHP4+ (PHP4, assuming the use ofPHP_Compat) and doesn’t require any extensions
13. Hybrid Auth
HybridAuth is an open source PHP library for authenticating through multiple social services and ID providers. The services supported include OpenID,Facebook, LinkedIn, Google,Twitter, Windows Live, Foursquare, Vimeo, Yahoo, PayPal and more.
14. PHP Intrusion Detection System
PHPIDS (PHP-Intrusion Detection System) is a simple to use, well structured, fast and state-of-the-art security layer for your PHP based web application. The IDS neither strips, sanitizes nor filters any malicious input, it simply recognizes when an attacker tries to break your site and reacts in exactly the way you want it to.
15. Tcrypto
TCrypto is a simple and flexible PHP 5.3+ in-memory key-value storage library. By default, a cookie will be used as a storage backend. TCrypto has been designed from the ground up with security in mind. Safe algorithms and modes.
Miscellaneous
I also included various miscellaneous libraries as well which will perform various task for your development needs.
16. PHP CPP Library
The PHP-CPP library is a C++ library for developing PHP extensions. It offers a collection of well documented and easy-to-use classes that can be used and extended to build native extensions for PHP.
17. Ratchet
Ratchet is a PHP library to let developers create real-time, bi-directional apps between clients and servers over WebSockets. It makes building event-driven apps (rather than traditional HTTP request/response apps) quick and easy.
18. Munee
Munee is an all-in-one library that handles many things related to optimization and manipulation of website assets. The library has a powerful caching feature that can cache resources in both server and client-side. It integrates well with the PHP image manipulation library: Imagine for resizing or cropping images (and caching them afterwards).
18. Whoops
whoops is an error handler base/framework for PHP. Out-of-the-box, it provides a pretty error interface that helps you debug your web projects, but at heart it’s a simple yet powerful stacked error handling system.
19. phpFastCache
phpFastCache is an open source PHP caching library that comes as asingle-file and can be integrated so quickly. It has support for multiple caching methods (apc, memcache, memcached, wincache, files, pdo and mpdo), the period of caching can be defined and has a very simplified API.
20. PHP Error
PHP Error is an open source PHP library for converting the standard PHP error messages -that are usually faced during the development process- into better ones. It integrates tightly into any PHP environment (works on all cases, only in development environment, only in some projects, etc.) and displays the errors with syntax highlighting.
21. Snappy
Snappy is a PHP5 library allowing thumbnail, snapshot or PDF generation from a url or a html page. It uses the excellent webkit-based wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage available on OSX, linux, windows.
22. PHP Markdown
This is a library package that includes the PHP Markdown parser and its sibling PHP Markdown Extra with additional features. Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).
23. Swift Mailer
Swift Mailer is a feature-rich PHP mailer library for sending e-mails from PHP websites and applications. It does not rely on PHP’s native mail() class which consumes high resources. Instead, Swift communicates directly with an SMTP server or a MTA binary to send mail quickly and efficiently.
24. Hoa
Hoa is a modular, extensible and structured set of PHP libraries. Moreover, Hoa aims at being a bridge between industrial and research worlds. This library is the foundation —the core— of all libraries of Hoa. It proposes fundamentals algorithms, paradigms and mechanisms and many more.
25. PHPExcel
PHPExcel is a library written in pure PHP and providing a set of classes that allow you to write to and read from different spreadsheet file formats, like Excel (BIFF) .xls, Excel 2007 (OfficeOpenXML) .xlsx, CSV, Libre/OpenOffice Calc .ods, Gnumeric, PDF, HTML, … This project is built around Microsoft’s OpenXML standard and PHP.
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