Houston PHP / MySQL Users Group

So as I promised (sorry for taking so long), here’s the list of links for the tools and libraries that were mentioned in our January meeting:

MySQL related tools:

• MySQL Administrator – a graphical user interface (GUI) tool to administer MySQL databases. Mainly geared towards DBAs, but very useful for your local development tasks as well.
• MySQL Query Browser – a GUI tool to query MySQL databases. Also very useful to write/debug stored procedures and functions on MySQL 5.
• DBDesigner – a GUI tool to help you design a database visually. Allows you to synchronize changes from your design document back into the MySQL database, and also allows you to reverse engineer a database into a design document.

PHP related tools:

• PEAR – the analogous of CPAN of Perl for the PHP community, this is a set of high quality PHP components (basically classes) ready to be re-used and integrated into your application. Pretty much everything you might need to build a web application is available here.
• Zend Studo IDE – one of the best text editors aimed at PHP developers, this is a must for big projects. It really does make development a lot easier. Price starts at $99 for the standard package.
• Zend Encoder – another pretty interesting tool from Zend allows you to encode your PHP source code, and ship that to your customers. That gives you the peace of mind of not having to worry about customers having access to your proprietary code.
• PHPEclipse – a free plugin to the popular Eclipse IDE that brings a bunch of advanced features (similar to what you would find in Zend Studio) to PHP developers.
• Xdebug – a PHP extension that provides a lot of debugging and profiling related information.

JavaScript related libraries:

• moo.fx – a lightweight (3kb) JavaScript effects library. See the website for more details and a demonstration of what it can do. This is very useful for Web 2.0 applications, as you can hide/display certain parts of your app.
• Tooltip.js – a JavaScript library aimed at creating tooltips powered by AJAX. Pretty simple stuff, but also very useful for those cases where you need this type of functionality.

Web Development tools (mainly Firefox extensions):

• Webdrive – a special Windows-only tool that allows you to mount a drive to a FTP/SFTP/SSH server. Commercial application, but very useful.
• Web Developer extension – provides a ton of useful tools and information to a web developer.
• Colorzilla extension – allows you to quickly get the color information from a web page.
• Live HTTP Headers extension – allows you to monitor the HTTP requests that are generated from a web application.