Code Climate, the popular static code analysis service, has made an announcement that will definitely help make checking your PHP application for quality and security issues easier - the release of the Code Climate Platform. This platform provides, among other things, a command line tool that you can use to run their analysis rules on your own systems.

Today, we’re thrilled to launch the Code Climate Platform − the first open, extensible platform for all types of static analysis. [...] What does this mean exactly? First, we’re open sourcing our analysis tools, including the engines and algorithms we use to evaluate code. We’re also enabling anyone to write static analysis engines that run on our servers by following a simple specification. [...] Finally, using our new Code Climate CLI, you can now run any Code Climate-compatible static analysis on your laptop – for free.

This is a great step forward to helping ensure the overall quality of your codebase and makes it even easier than having to rely on a fully external service for the results. Plus, with the specification you can write rules and customize the checks according to your application or framework of choice. They have a developer program you can register for to find out more information about that.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted the latest in their series of community interviews, this time with a group of people from Code Climate, a quality and testing service with easy integration with things like GitHub and Travis-CI for automated testing.

Cal is joined by Beth Tucker Long, Jeff Rafter, Bryan Helmkamp and David Calavera. They talk about what Code Climate does, the services they offer and the languages they can test. They also talk about the free offering they have for public, open source repositories (but do have an option for private repositories). Cal also asks about what Code Climate can do to help reduce technical debt in current projects.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 for listening at your leisure. If you enjoy the interview, be sure to subscribe to their feed to get the latest episodes as they're released.