coding standard

PHP CodeSniffer is a wonderfully simple tool for implementing and enforcing a coding standard.

The basic installation comes with a handful of existing coding standards, like PEAR.

One can easily cobble together a coding standard with a subset of sniffs from any of the existing coding standards.

It’s even fairly simple to write your own sniffs in the event an existing sniff just isn’t quite right.

PHP_CodeSniffer is probably the most convenient tool out there to analyze your source code and to verify it complies to company policies.

On the Mayflower blog today there's a new tutorial posted about creating coding standard "sniffs" for the PHP_CodeSniffer tool.

A "sniff" is what defines the rules for your coding standards to follow (like "curly braces after function definitions should be on the next line" kinds of things).

When our project is supervised by a continous integration platform, we are (hopefully) using static code analysis tools.

One of the best for analysing PHP code is PHP_CodeSniffer which integrates fine into systems like PhpUnderControl, Hudson or Bamboo.

But in some cases the pre-installed coding standards like PEAR or Zend might not be sufficient for our current project or we want to deviate.

This is the moment when we want to be able to create a custom one that fits our special needs.

Zend Studio is a great IDE and we use it a lot at Ibuildings (in addition to NetBeans, PDT and Vim).

One of the nice features is the code formatter that helps develop code according to agreed standards, which is useful to keep projects consistent.

Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:

• Ask About PHP Blog: Google Analytics API class for PHP
• Coders' View Blog: The Strategy Pattern Using PHP
• TheWebSqueeze.com: PHP5 Abstraction for the Rest of Us
• PHPFreaks.com: or die() must die
• DevShed: Advanced PHP Form Input Validation to Check User Inputs

Travis Swicegood, a member of the Standards Group that has formed in the PHP community, has posted some of his own thoughts about the group and what kinds of goals he sees it having.

Lukas Smith has voiced some of his own opinions on the Standards Group from an outsider's point of view (Lukas is a well-known member of the PHP community but not a part of the Standards Group).

From SC-L:

We would like to invite the community to review and comment on the current version of the CERT C Secure Coding Standard available online at www.securecoding.cert.org before Version 1.0 is published.

Hey, maybe this is also relevant for the curriculum thread.