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