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Building commercial grade PHP applications with open source and free software

Professional PHP applications require solid investment in development tools, software libraries and other $$$ costing assets. Have you seen such titles around the thematic editions? Well while this will surely give a head start it's far for vital necessity. The next few lines will list popular free alternatives to some popular commercial software - [http://ustrem.org/en/articles/reading-xls-with-php-en/ PHPMailer tutorial].

Development environments

Zend Studio is the leader to most people here. However you can safe the precious license fee by using some of its relatives for free. For example Netbeans PHP. It's Oracle sponsored project with wide variety of features - remote debugging, Zend framework and a bunch of other frameworks build-in support.

Email capabilities

Next is email software library - virtually every project needs some way to send an email. Instead of buying template enabled mail library with SMTP server subscription why not use Smarty template system with PHPMailer and a free Gmail account?. PHPMailer provides all the features that you'll need - external SMTP server integration, plain and HTML messages with different encoding, attachments and inline images.

Data import and export software

Here we step deep into commercial software area. There are thousands of applications, offering import and export of data from Microsoft Excel worksheet, CSV formats, XML and others. Most of them will do the work, but you'll end up paying for something that you use on 5%. Native XLS format reading and writing is freely provided by Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader and Spreadsheet_Excel_Writer PEAR packages. Built-in PHP stream XML parsers enable you to process arbitrary long XML documents - even those multi gig Amazon product lists.

Image processing

Whether do you need this to watermark, resize or crop user provided images, or generate complex collages and animations you can rely on at least two alternatives - GD and ImageMagic extensions. My personal favourite here is ImageMagic with virtually unlimited set of operations - it's the developer's Photoshop.

Instant messaging

You can [http://ustrem.org/en/articles/webicqlite-icq-with-php-en/ PHPMailer tutorial], did you know that? Just use the open source WebIcqLite or WebIcqPro classes. This enables your clients to interact with your applications not just by using Web.


In conclusion there are many others freebies out there waiting you to find them. Just review the possibilities and use the one that most suits your needs. This will help you kick off your projects with less initial capital and will therefore have quick time to market.