Zebra: series of 6 advantageous PHP libraries/classes
Tags: php, programming, tutorial, beginners
Published: 2022-05-06 07:10:41

**What is PHP?**

PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Instead of lots of commands to output HTML (as seen in C or Perl), PHP pages contain HTML with embedded code that does “something” (in this case, output “Hi, I’m a PHP script!”). The PHP code is enclosed in special start and end processing instructions <?php and ?> that allow you to jump into and out of “PHP mode.”

The best things in using PHP are that it is extremely simple for a newcomer, but offers many advanced features for a professional programmer. Don’t be afraid of reading the long list of PHP’s features. You can jump in, in a short time, and start writing simple scripts in a few hours.

**What is Programming libraries?**

In programming, a library is a collection of pre compiled routines that a program can use. The routines, sometimes called modules, are stored in object format. Libraries are particularly useful for storing frequently used routines because you do not need to explicitly link them to every program that uses them. The linker automatically looks in libraries for routines that it does not find elsewhere. In MS-Windows environments, library files have a .DLLextension.

From here you can check one of the most useful libraries “Zebra” which we recommend :

**1-Zebra_cURL, a high performance PHP cURL library**

Zebra_cURL is a high-performance PHP library acting as a wrapper to PHP’s libcurl library, which not only allows the running of multiple requests at once asynchronously, in parallel, but also as soon as one thread finishes it can be processed right away without having to wait for the other threads in the queue to finish.

**2-Zebra_Database, a MySQL database wrapper written in PHP**

Zebra_Database it is an advanced, compact (one-file only), lightweight, object-oriented MySQL database wrapper built upon PHP’s MySQL extension. It provides methods for interacting with MySQL databases that are more intuitive and fun to use than PHP’s default ones.

**3-Zebra_Form, a jQuery augmented PHP library for creating and validating beautiful, secure, and functional HTML forms**

Zebra_Form is a PHP class that simplifies the process of creating and validating HTML forms. Its object-oriented structure promotes rapid HTML forms development and encourages developers to write clean and easily maintainable code. It frees the developers from the repetitive task of writing the code for validating forms by offering powerful built-in client-side and server-side validation.

**4-Zebra_Image, a lightweight image manipulation library written in PHP**

A compact (one-file only), lightweight, object-oriented image manipulation library written in and for PHP, that provides methods for performing several types of image manipulation operations. It doesn’t require any external libraries other than the GD2 extension (with which PHP usually comes pre-compiled with).

**5-Zebra_Mptt, a PHP class providing an implementation of the modified preorder tree traversal algorithm**

Zebra_MPTT is a PHP class that provides an implementation of the modified preorder tree traversal algorithm making it easy for you to use MPTT in your PHP applications. It provides methods for adding nodes anywhere in the tree, deleting nodes, moving and copying nodes around the tree and methods for retrieving various information about the nodes.

**6-Zebra_Pagination, a generic pagination PHP class**

A generic pagination class that automatically generates navigation links given the total number of items and the number of items per page. This is a *generic* pagination class, meaning that it does not display any records! It is up to the developer to fetch the actual data and displaying it based on the information returned by this class. The advantage is that it can be used to paginate over records coming from any source (arrays, database, etc).

**7-Zebra_Session, a wrapper for PHP’s default session handling functions, using MySQL for storage**

Zebra_Session is a PHP class that acts as a wrapper for PHP’s default session handling functions but instead of storing session data in flat files it stores them in a MySQL database, thus providing both better security and better performance.

Source: [TechWebies](http://www.techwebies.com/2015/02/zebra-series-of-php-libraries-like.html)