10 PHP Libraries That You Should Not Miss

It has been 25 years since the first version of PHP in 1995. Despite of its age, PHP is still one of the most programming languages in the world and be the top choice of many back-end developers. Let look at 10 PHP libraries that you need to know.

1. PHP-ML

https://github.com/php-ai/php-ml

A new way to approach Machine Learning (ML) in PHP, PHP-ML is an interesting library to work with. It provides you an easy way to use API training your bot to do prediction based on your inputs. It contains a series of algorithms to recognize patterns and performs complicated statistics.

2. Opauth

https://github.com/opauth/opauth

This library allows users to authenticate via their personal account on social networks or other services. Of course, it includes all the big names: Google, Facebook, Twitter, Github, Instagram, LinkedIn.

Opauth is supported by many PHP Frameworks, it is easily to be integrated in almost all current PHP applications such as: vanilla (plain) PHP applications, CakePHP, CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, Laravel, PrestaShop, and many more.

3. PHPMailer

https://github.com/PHPMailer/PHPMailer

No PHP library collections is perfect without PHPMailer - an complete email library for PHP. This project is supported by large community and being used in very popular applications such as Wordpress and Drupal. That makes it become first choice for sending email in PHP. It supports SMTP, HTML email and more..

4. ImageWorkshop

http://phpimageworkshop.com/

ImageWorkshop is open-source PHP library allowing you to work with image layers. With it, you can easily change image size, crop, create thumbnail, adding watermark and more. Here is some example:

ImageWorkshop is developed to make your most common work on image in the easiest way. If you need more powerful library, you can look for Imagine library.

5. Carbon

https://github.com/briannesbitt/Carbon

Carbon is a great open source library to deal with datetime with various class and methods. For example:

6. Ubench

https://github.com/devster/ubench

Ubench is a small library to check performance of your PHP code. It measures your code execution time as well as the needed memory. Using Ubench during your application development is a good idea as it can help to analyze, detect and enhance your code quality, ultimately improve the performance of your application.

7. Faker

Faker is a PHP library to create fake data. It is very convenient and easy to use when you need an experiment database or sample data for your web application. Let look at some sample code:

Every time you call properties of the object, a new random data will be generated.

8. Omnipay

https://github.com/adrianmacneil/omnipay

Omnipay is a payment library for PHP. It has a clear and coherent API and support various payment gateway. With this library, we only need to work with one API and work with different payment options. Because of using single unified API, we can easily use many gateways at same time or switch between them when needed.

9. PHPGeo

https://github.com/mjaschen/phpgeo

PHPGeo is an simple library that allows us to calculate geographical distance between coordinates with high precision. This library support well those applications working based on geo locations. In order to get the coordinates, you can use location api of HTML5 or Yahoo api.

10. KoolReport's Google Chart

https://github.com/koolreport/core

KoolReport is an good open source PHP library to provide reporting capability for your application. Google Charts is part of KoolReport can bring you good and free php chart solution. It provides more than 20 most common & advanced charts. The code is very simple to use:

ColumnChart::create([
    "dataSource"=>[
        ["category","amount"],
        ["Computer",100],
        ["Laptop",50],
        ["Tablet",80],
        ["Phones",150],    
    ]
]);

You may view more examples

Conclusion

Above are 10 most popular libraries that you can use to power your php application. Hope that our share is useful.

<3 koolreport team

KoolReport 4.5.1 has been released!

We are happy to announce that we have released KoolReport core version 4.5.1 with new features. The KoolReport Pro also reaches same version number 4.5.1 with the new core update and the upgrade of individual packages such as Excel, Inputs, D3, ChartJs.

KoolReport's class

KoolReport's class is provided with new getXml() method to get the representation of your report in xml format. The xml contains both data and meta data of all report's datastores.

DataStore

In this version, we continue to enrich methods of datastore. DataStore has a new method called distinct(). As the name suggested, distinct method will have you to get a list of unrepeated values from a column. Furthermore, Datastore is provided with new toArray() and toJson() methods to get array and JSON. This could be useful if you need result in array form for further processing or JSON format to be returned in your REST API.

New DataSource

We have added new DataSource called ExistedPdoDataSource to handle source in case you only have the PDO object but connection settings. So you only need to send your existed PDO object as parameter to your report and provide it with ExistedPdoDataSource in settings() method.

JsonSpread process

JsonSpread is a new processed added to KoolReport in order to spread JSON data into column in data stream. By doing so, we are able to apply other KoolReport's processes to further process the JSON data.

Support CI/CD process

Since the popularity of CI/CD process, KoolReport library now fully support this new type of software integration and delivery processes. We understand the 1 hour token availability causes trouble for the automation delivery so we have increases the life time of token to maximum. In particular, the token will last until your subscription of KoolReport Pro is ended. If you have purchase the Perpetual Usage, the token expiration will be set the 2100-01-01 which is virtually life-time or never expired.

Support load balancing

If you are using load balancing with multiple servers containing app (with KoolReport integrated), the generated resource folders now have same name in all servers. So virtually, the client-side will be able to receive resource files regardless of servers it connects to.

D3Chart Client Events

The D3 chart has been upgraded with one of the most crucial features: client events. This is the missing part in D3 first version. Now all charts support itemSelect event which help you to track the click of user to item on the charts. Now D3 is able to work with DrillDown package to provide interactive drill down report.

DrillDown supports D3

Missing client events hindered the collaboration of DrillDown package with D3 chart. But not anymore, since the D3 package has supported the client events, the DrillDown package also support generate D3 Chart. By specifying the D3 chart as drilldown widgets, the DrillDown will bind itself to D3 itemSelect to provide interactive report.

Excel Package

We have fixed the PieChart display in Microsoft Excel and a minor bugs happened when data is missing.

ChartJS Package

We have upgraded the core of ChartJS to latest version of 2.9.x. With this new upgrade, some of known issues has been addressed. Furthermore, we have provided new plugins property which allows you to use most popular plugins for ChartJS like datalabels, annotation, stacked100 and others.

Inputs Package

Due to the upgrade of FontAwesome library in previous KoolReport's version, some of the icons have not been displayed correctly. This issue has been addressed in this new version of Inputs package.

New Yii2 Package

In this release, we roll out new package koolreport\yii2. As the name suggested, yii2 package will facilitate the integration of KoolReport with Yii2, one of the most used frameworks in PHP. Similar to other integration packages that we have created before like laravel or codeigniter, the yii2 package will help to auto configure report's assets settings and allow report to access to default database connection setup within Yii2.

Summary

The version 4.5.x added new features and empowered reporting capability to KoolReport. This upgrade is backward compatible with old 4.x versions so feel free to upgrade. If you need have any question about this new release, do not hesitate to let us know.

Thank you!

<3 koolreport team