legacy code

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.

Some people have this misconception that there is a plot to kill of the original mysql extension (aka ext/mysqli) in PHP.

So first off, I know that bloggers are not journalist.

So apprently fact-checking is not required for a rant blog post. ;-) But if a blog post is a rant, it should be labeled as such.

At work, we used a SVN server and enforced our project coding standard with a pre-commit hook on the server that ran PHP_CodeSniffer.

Whenever a developer tried to commit some code that does not match the standard, he got it rejected.

To be able to check in legacy code, our commit hook recognized special commit message tags like "SKIP_CS".

Developers using that were logged and beaten at the end of the week when they used it too often :)

Today, my brain refused to recall details of mercurial commands and I moved GObject for PHP project to github.

I didn’t mention this project on blog, but that is only because I wasn’t blogging much lately.

Till Klampaeckel has put together this new post looking at the track_errors ini option (that will always put the latest error message in $phperrormsg) and how it can help you more efficiently handle the errors your application throws.

IBM Developerworks: "Porting legacy Perl to Python can be a daunting task. In this article, learn some of the theory behind dealing with legacy code, including what not to do."

I’m looking for a PHP developer to fill a permanent web team lead developer & team leader role, based in Bath in the UK.

An interesting question was raised by dvduval in the SitePoint forums recently: Should we stop coding for PHP4?

Juozas Kaziukenas has a suggestion for all of those developers (and web applications) out there that are still resting back on their comfort zone of PHP 5.2 - don't be afraid of PHP 5.3, the earlier the adoption the better!