Tomas Vortuba has a new post to his site sharing some of his experiences with static function analysis (and fixing) and the trap he got himself into when evaluating the current state of his code. This is a continuation of his series covering the use of the SymfonyCodingStandard package.

PHP story with code examples, copy-cat killers, just a little bit of static, consistency, sniffs and way to prevent all that ever happening ever again.

In his post he uses an example "fixer" for testing DocBlock comments to see if they provide much useful information over what the PHP itself provides. He dives "under the surface" and looks at the steps it takes to accomplish this. He then gets to the "trap" part, showing the code behind the fixer and how depending on 3rd party packages and their parsing lead to code mistakenly being "fixed". He finishes up the post with a look at a few solutions that could help make these "traps" easier to fix including dependency injection and preventing the issue specifically with static functions.

Fabien Potencier has a new post to his site talking about a milestone for the PHP-CS Fixer tool (used to fix code to be compliant to the PSR-1 & PSR-2 standards) - a full, stable 1.0 release.

A few years ago, I wrote a small script to automatically fix some common coding standard mistakes people made in Symfony pull requests. It was after I got bored about all the comments people made on pull requests to ask contributors to fix their coding standards. [...] After a while, I decided to Open-Source the tool, like I do with almost all the code I write. [...] To my surprise, people started to use it on their own code, found bugs, found edge cases, added more fixers, and soon enough, we all realise that using regular expressions for such things is doomed to fail.

In recent months the tool has undergone a rewrite to work with the tokens instead of regular expressions (lead by Dariusz Ruminski) and the 1.0 release of this updated version has been made:

After 13,000 additions and 5,000 deletions, I'm very proud to announce version 1.0 of PHP-CS-Fixer; it is smarter, it is more robust, and it has more fixers. Any downsides? Yes, speed; the tool is much slower, but it is worth it and enabling the new cache layer helps a lot.

On PHPMaster.com today there's new tutorial showing how you can enforce compliance with the PSR standards in your application's code with the help of the Jenkins continuous integration tool.

Though it’s still early to guarantee that the PSRs will be widely adopted as the de facto standard for writing serious PHP applications, it is interesting to note that a code sniffer and fixer that looks for code deviations was developed by nobody less than Fabien Potencier, the creator of the Symfony framework. (Et bien, ils ne sont pas fous, ces français!) In the rest of the article we shall find out what his PHP-CS-Fixer does and how can it be integrated with a CI tool like Jenkins.

He shows how to install a tool that can help you keep your source in compliance - the "fixer" (created by Fabien Potencier) to help correct the problems found in your code. He includes the command line calls you'll need to run the tool on your code and how to add the step to your build.