The Exakat blog has an interesting post to their site sharing some statistics from the applications they've scanned related to commonly used coding styles. In this PHP Index of Coding (for 2018) they share a listing of practices in the order of popularity according to the results of over 1700 projects.

Not using @ is the poster child of good practices. It’s also looked upon, as an impossible goal. Did you know that the @ operator is only merely used by 50% of PHP applications ? Same for parenthesis with include (and co) : don’t use them, like 50% of the developpers. This is how the Exakat PHP Index of coding was born.

Every month, Exakat runs thousands of analysis on half a billion lines of PHP code. This is primarily for testing purpose, a kind of torture test that checks the engine runs on any kind of code. And it is very useful to ensure all situations are correctly handled.

We also extracted the following stats out of 1700+ projects, analysis by analysis. This way, any issue may be ranked from ‘wide spread’ to ‘very unusual’. In fact, ‘wide spread’ may also be understood as : ‘almost a feature’.

The results are ranked by frequency of appearance with the top five being:

• Uses Default Values
• Used Once Variables (In Scope)
• Unused Methods
• Method Could Be Private Method
• Should Use Local Class

For each item in the list there's a link to more information about the check and how much it has changed since the last time the index was generated.

The Run Geek Radio podcast has posted their latest episode today. In it (episode #5) host Adam Culp talks about time estimation, thoughts on conference talk ratings and the contest winner from his standing desk contest mentioned in an earlier episode.

This episode Adam Culp announces the winner, David Stockton (Colorado), of the contest launched in Run Geek Radio episode 004. [...] Adam also talks briefly to clarify his views on “soft talks” versus “soft skills talks”, and how he was misrepresented as disliking soft skills talks though the opposite is true. [...] Then this episode is rounded out with a detailed coverage of time estimation in relation to projects, and why it is so vitally important to be accurate. Adam also speaks about how important proper requirements gathering is to the process.

You can either use the in-page audio player to listen to this latest episode or you can download the mp3 of the show. Be sure to subscribe to the feed if you enjoy the show and want to hear more from Adam.

In this recent post to the Duckout blog, they show you how to hook your PHP-based (and database driven) application into the Google Charting API for chart/graph generation.

I think, whenever we see a chart in a magazine, in books or applications our brain say’s to us Yeepie!!! Don’t read these stupid texts or tables! Just look at the green or yellow line and hope that they are above the other lines or hope that your opinion is the biggest part of the pie. This saves us a lot of work and in my opinion we should concentrate on drawing beautiful colorized pie charts, instead of writing long boring articles. But the question is: How do I draw these beautiful colorized pie charts? The simple answer is: you don’t have to, because google will draw them for you and you just have to tell them what to draw via the google charts api.

The sample application is a "breakfast rating" tool that logs the results to a MySQL database via PDO calls. The results are then extracted and formated as JSON to be compatible with the Google Charts API data handling. Some sample Javascript is included showing how to call the Charts API with your data and get back a simple line graphing of the data from the database. You can see the application in action here for reference.

Dave Gardner has put together a post about some work he did with the Joind.in API (an event feedback site) to apply collective intelligence to the results of the PHP UK Conference.

The term "collective intelligence" refers to intelligence that emerges from the collaboration of a group. In this case, we can leverage the data within joind.in and make "intelligent" recommendations. This post looks at building a simple recommendation engine using the data from joind.in. You can download the entire source code here (gzipped) or view via PasteBin here and try it out for yourself.

His code connects to the Joind.in API and fetches the event's talk information and the comments for each. His "calculatePearson" function then takes in two users and the set of ratings to figure out how similar their preferences are. There's also a bit of code that approaches it from a different angle - providing recommendations for users based on their own comments.

On the NETTUTS.com site there's new tutorial showing you how to combine the power of PHP and jQuery to create a quick and easy star rating system for your web application.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to build a rating system with AJAX, PHP, and jQuery. Votes will be recorded and updated in real-time with the magic of AJAX, and we’ll also leverage the power of PHP so that you don’t even need a database!

The Ajax portion of the script is handled by a "$.post" request made from jQuery to the PHP backend when a star is clicked. Once the message is sent to the PHP backend, the information is serialized and pushed into a text file. This method can easily be modified to work with a database too.

ParanoidFerret.com is back with another Flex and PHP article today and this time, some other friends are joining in - JSON and MySQL.

To follow-up on the Flex and PHP tutorial we did earlier I thought it would be nice to do a complete tutorial on php, mysql, flex, and json. This tutorial should show a decent way to send data in a database to and from flex to php using json. I will explain this in more detail in just a moment.

Included in the tutorial is a sample of the end result and all of the code you'll need - the database setup, the PHP code to connect to it and pass along the JSON message content, and the Flex/code XML to handle the creation of the requests and update the data in the app according to the response.

ParanoidFerret.com is back with another Flex and PHP article today and this time, some other friends are joining in - JSON and MySQL.

To follow-up on the Flex and PHP tutorial we did earlier I thought it would be nice to do a complete tutorial on php, mysql, flex, and json. This tutorial should show a decent way to send data in a database to and from flex to php using json. I will explain this in more detail in just a moment.

Included in the tutorial is a sample of the end result and all of the code you'll need - the database setup, the PHP code to connect to it and pass along the JSON message content, and the Flex/code XML to handle the creation of the requests and update the data in the app according to the response.

Sometimes, when you're building an application, simpler is better. At least, that's how Greg Bulmash approached it in his new post about creating a simple rating script for your site with PHP and MySQL.

There are lots of pre-packaged scripts out there to do almost anything you want, but in my experience a lot of them either do too much or don’t do enough. Finding that Goldilocks style of "just right" takes a lot of searching and experimenting, or just plain hacking of existing scripts. But for simple functions, writing your own script that does exactly what you want can often be quicker and more satisfying.

He goes through what a rating system is and can be used for before getting to the code (as well as other things that could be tacked on at the end to make it a bit more complex). Then, it's on to the code - first the database layout, then the script to store the rating the visitor gave the item, and the script that shows the averaged results.

Sometimes, when you're building an application, simpler is better. At least, that's how Greg Bulmash approached it in his new post about creating a simple rating script for your site with PHP and MySQL.

There are lots of pre-packaged scripts out there to do almost anything you want, but in my experience a lot of them either do too much or don’t do enough. Finding that Goldilocks style of "just right" takes a lot of searching and experimenting, or just plain hacking of existing scripts. But for simple functions, writing your own script that does exactly what you want can often be quicker and more satisfying.

He goes through what a rating system is and can be used for before getting to the code (as well as other things that could be tacked on at the end to make it a bit more complex). Then, it's on to the code - first the database layout, then the script to store the rating the visitor gave the item, and the script that shows the averaged results.

If you're looking for a good PHP resource, check out this list from Top-books.org - a listing of PHP and web-related books ranked by their Amazon ranking.

Included in the list are books like:

• Luke Welling and Laura Thomson's PHP and MySQL Web Development
• Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition by Jason Gilmore
• Chris Snyder and Michael Southwell's Pro PHP Security (Pro)