On the SitePoint PHP blog there's a post from Claudio Ribeiro introducing you to a new static analysis tool to help improve the quality of your code - PHP Static Analyzer, or "PHPSA" for short.

One requirement that never changes whether you are working on your projects alone or in a team, on small projects or big, is Code Quality. The bigger the project and the team, the harder it gets to maintain it.

A good way of slowing this increase in difficulty down is to use static analysis tools. Static analysis is the process of analyzing software without actually executing the program – a sort of automatic code review. Static analysis tools will detect common errors, enforce coding standards, and even clean up code blocks. The days of php -l filename are not over, but we now have a number of great tools that go the extra mile in helping us create and maintain high quality code.

They start with an example of using the tried and true "php -l" to lint an example PHP file but note that the yes/no answer it provides doesn't help give much feedback on the quality of the code, just its syntax. Enter PHPSA, a Composer-installable tool that does much more than lint checking. It also provides information about things like missing docblocks, function alias use and undefined property usage. they show an example of it in use on the command line, the results it provides and the changes made to the example class to fix the issues it found.

Christian Scheb has posted about an interesting idea in this article on his site - creating "tombstones" in your application to help you determine what code in your application is "dead".

Earlier this year I took over that project at my new company. [...] The repository was cluttered by many files, that could assumed to be dead code. Unfortunately, you never know. [...] The mission was clear: Cleaning up the project, without breaking things.

[...] I searched the web and came across that interesting concept of tombstones. If you haven’t heard of tombstones yet, I highly recommend this article and watching the video of David Schnepper’s ignite talk. A tombstone is basically an executable marker in your code (in the PHP world: a function call), which is placed in fragments of code, that you’ve assumed to be dead. Then, everything is deployed to production and, when a tombstone is invoked, it writes some data to a log. After a while, the logs will enable you to identify dead and undead code (called “Vampires”) in your project.

Not finding a good tool to help with this in an existing codebase, he created a library that makes it simpler to both mark the "tombstones" in your code and another to analyze the results. He includes an example of what the report might look like, showing both the used and unused bits of code where the tombstone code was placed.

On the Zend Developer Zone today there's a new tutorial posted that shows how to use the Zend_Search_Lucene component of the Zend Framework to create a stemming analyzer.

The Zend implementation of Lucene provides a powerful tool set for those looking to implement a Google-like search for their PHP web application. One of the requirements in creating a Google-like search with Zend is the creation of a stemming, stop word filtering, lower-casing analyzer. This article will briefly discuss the basic role of an analyzer in the Lucene API, my implementation of a new "StandardAnalyzer" for the Zend_Search_Lucene component of the Zend Framework, the inner workings of this analyzer, and its basic usage.

It talks about the creation of an analyzer - a tool that splits out words, removes some of the most common and standardizes the contents (like making it all lowercase such as the StandardAnalyzer in Java's Lucene does). The author has come up with his own implementation in PHP and works through it, explaining how it works and where to put the data and language files it would need to pull from.