The KoolReport Blog

Announcements, discussions, and more for KoolReport and its extended packages.

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.

Most Used PHP Libraries

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.

PHP Machine Learning

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.

PHP Authentication

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..

PHPMailer

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:

PHP Image Library

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:

PHP Datetime library

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.

Ubench

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:

PHP Fake Data

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.

PHP Omni payment

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.

PHP Geo Library

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

Our Story

KoolReport started as our internal project to standardize our report construction and growing to a strong framework for reporting. The strengths of KoolReport are its light-weight, speed, features extensibility and ability to integrate seamlessly into other PHP Frameworks.

We have put the first line of code in Jan 2017. Previously we have made thousand of reports for our customers. We saw the repeated tasks and common issues in making reports. That leads us to the thought of making a framework so that we could save time on repeated tasks and eliminate common issues.

Moreover, by having a standard framework for reports of all projects, we are able to manage code easier than before. Previously, each project followed different code patterns which make the took-over developer difficult to understand, fix code and develop further. But now, all reporting project follows the same pattern of code, the hand-over task become lesser and the documentation tasks are easier.

Take off

The KoolReport was first created solely for purpose of internal usage but we published it on GitHub and announced to KoolPHP users. Since then, we were very happy that KoolReport received very good feedbacks from thousand developers all over the world. Those are our great momentum to develop KoolReport further, adding more and more useful packages around it.

Until this time, we must say that KoolReport has become one of the top reporting framework or reporting tools. You may try to search google for “php report”, “php reporting tools” or “php reporting framework”, you may see us on top. That makes us very proud!

The concept of KoolReport is very simple, data is pulled from various data-sources, piped through series of processes then later saved to data store ready to be visualized. In the first phase, data connection, we provide PDODataSource as the main connectors to most common databases such as MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle etc. In the second phase. data processing, we provided over 30+ type of processes which you can use to transform your data. In the last phase, data visualization, Google Charts was chosen as our built-in charts library because of its power and the abundant of charts type.

KoolReport remains free and open-sources forever under MIT license which virtually does not bind you with any obligation when use KoolReport. You can download it, tweak it, use it, deliver it freely.

Around KoolReport core, we built a number of extended packages to extend its capability. A half of them are free for you use to just register and download. Some of them come with a tiny price, you consider the license purchasing as your donation to keep project going. We want KoolReport to go far so we need your help to fund the development and support.

KoolReport Pro

There is a special version of KoolReport called KoolReport Pro. This is an advanced version of KoolReport in which we combined KoolReport with all available extensions into single build. The compatibility between the core and extensions are guaranteed. We provide Developer License, Team License and Enterprise License for KoolReport Pro. Developer License is for individual who use KoolReport Pro to create reports for personal usage or for clients. Team License is for small team with max 5 developers. Enterprise License is for company which allows any developers within company can use KoolReport. Both of licenses comes with Priority Support and Free Upgrade privilege. Within a year, you will get support from our software engineer and data specialist to utilize the power of KoolReport Pro. And with the Free Upgrade privilege, you are free to download the latest library update with new features and new packages. Check out our KoolReport Pro if you are interested.

Get Started

To get started with KoolReport, please go ahead to our website koolreport.com and download the latest version of KoolReport. You may download, unzip and copy KoolReport folder into your web app or your can use Composer to install library. It is convenient in both ways.

We provide number of examples for you to start with. You may find the source code of all examples in the KoolReport & Examples version that you downloaded.

Remember to join our forum. There you can find all most all answers for your questions. If not, just simply create a new topic with your question, our support team will point you to the right direction. Or if you feel more convenient with Facebook, we have a group on Facebook that you can join and start discussing. Here is the group: KoolReport - The PHP Reporting Framework. Join us!

Resources

  1. Our website - Where all things begin.
  2. Forum - You may find all Q&A in here
  3. Examples & Demo - Over 100+ examples to demonstrate how KoolReport works
  4. Documentation - Documentation & API
  5. Blogs - This will keep you update of KoolReport releases, new packages, promotion & more.
  6. Github - You may clone or fork our project to play with it.
  7. Twitter - If you use Twitter, follow us to keep updated.
  8. Facebook Page - If you use Facebook, follow us to keep updated.
  9. Facebook Group - Keep update faster and interact with other members

Thank you very much and if you have any question, please let us know.

<3 koolreport team


KoolReport helps to analyze your data and ultimately turn them into visual reports or dynamic dashboards.

"KoolReport helps me very much in creating data report for my corporate! Keep up your good work!"

Alain Melsens

"The first use of your product. I was impressed by its easiness and powerfulness. This product is a great product and amazing."

Dr. Lew Choy Onn

"Fantastic framework for reporting!"

Greg Schneider
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