In a new post to his site Christian Weiske shares an update he contributed to the PHP_CodeSniffer functionality to make working with and checking the validity of local PHP code easier - a notifier for PHP_CodeSniffer using the "notify-send" commonly installed in most Linux distributions.

I use emacs as IDE, and wanted to have direct feedback about the validity of my .php files when writing them. The most easy way was to add a save hook that runs PHP_CodeSniffer - but the results should be displayed in a nice, unobtrusive way. phpcs has multiple reporting modes - xml, checkstyle, csv etc. - but nothing for the desktop. I thought that notify-send would be the right fit since it is able to display pretty popup messages without getting in the way.

He also includes the details on his original objective - including it in a "on save" hook as well as providing it in a keystroke shortcut, making checking his code even easier.

On NetTuts.com they're posted a new tutorial about using the Stripe service to accept credit cards on your site. Thanks to some handy libraries they provide, integration is a relatively simple process.

Until recently, accepting credit cards on a website was expensive and complicated. But that was before Stripe: a radically different and insanely awesome credit card processing company. Today, I'll show you how to start accepting cards in 30 minutes or less - without spending a dime.

They step you through the whole process you'll need to get the full flow set up:

• Install an SSL Certificate (on your server)
• Create an Account
• Create Your Payment Form
• Collect The Form Values
• Request a Token
• Create a Server-Side Script

Screenshots of the Stripe interface, HTML, Javascript and PHP code are all included - everything you need to make the simple card handling work. One of the keys to how Stripe deals with credit cards is that you provide it the card info, it gives you a token. Your app uses this to work with the card instead of storing the card information in your database (also making it more secure).

Klaus Silveira has created a set of PHP_CodeSniffer rules that can be used to test your code for the recently approved PSR-1 & PSR-2 standards.

This is a PHP_CodeSniffer sniff to check against the PHP Standard Resolutions: PSR-0, PSR-1 and PSR-2. Those standards were approved by the PHP Framework Interoperability Group. You can read more about the PHP FIG and the PSR's on this excellent article by Paul Jones.

The github repository also provides an overview of the standards themselves and how to get these sniffs installed.

In an informal poll Lorna Mitchell recently asked fellow developers to weigh in on what static analysis tool they used on their code. She's posted the results to her blog today with one of the tools being a clear winner.

My interest was mostly because I'm working on a book chapter which includes some static analysis content, and there are a couple of these tools that I include in my own builds, but I don't do much with the output of them. However I didn't want to drop anything from the chapter if it was actually a valuable tool and I was just missing the point - pretty much all the tools got a good number of votes though, so I'll be covering all of the [options].

According to her results, the most used tool by developers is the PHP_CodeSniffer with the PHP Mess Detector and PHP Copy & Paste Detector tied for second place.

Christian Weiske has a problem he hopes you can help with - he's trying to get the PHP_Codesniffer tool integrated into his git workflow (well, the workflow of his team) as an automatic process that runs on commit. Unfortunately he's having some issues.

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. [...] The only way to enforce the standard is a pre-receive hook on our central Git repository server that all devs push to. Just installing the SVN hook on it isn't the solution, though.

Because of how git handles commits (possibly multiple in one push) the usual methods won't work. Other tricky things like file renaming and allowing for legacy code check-ins are also needed. He's posted the question on StackOverflow too, but no one's come up with a good answer yet (at the time of this post).

On the PHP on Windows section of DZone.com, Eric Hogue looks at the PHPsrc extension for Eclipse - a handy tool that lets you run some of the common PHP QA tools right from the IDE.

PHPsrc is a plugin that allow you to run PHP_CodeSniffer, PHPUnit, PHP Depend and PHP Copy/Paste Detector directly in Eclipse. The site also says that more tools should come. As you work, you will see any transgression you make. That will save you from breaking the build, but it also makes it easier to fix the problem. After all, you just wrote the faulty lines of code.

He walks you through the install of the plugin and shows you how to set things up to point to the executables on your development environment (complete with some screenshots). There's even an example of the output for a particularly offensive (standards-wise, of course) piece of code.

New from NETTUTS.com today there's a new article listing out some of the tools of the trade, the frameworks that web development professionals use (and not just with PHP).

New web development frameworks, promising rapid development and easy deployment, are sprouting out at a more rapid pace than you can keep up. In the last article, we looked at the various factors you'd have to consider when deciding on a framework. Today, we are going to look at the various frameworks available for each facet of web development.

PHP tools that made the list include CakePHP, the Zend Framework, Kohana and Symfony. Frameworks from some of the other languages include ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, jQuery and Blueprint.