The Exakat service has posted their latest "PHP Index of Coding" for August 2018. In this index, they share statistics from the projects the service has analyzed and some trends based on the results.

Every month, Exakat runs thousands of analysis on half a million lines of PHP code. This is primarily for testing purpose, a kind of torture test that checks the engine run 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’. May be we can suggest a few of them to wiki.php.net.

They include both the latest results and how they compare from the previous entries from May 2018. Analysis points include things like:

• Used Once Variables (In Scope)
• PHP Keywords As Names
• Property Used In One Method Only
• Unitialized Properties
• Should Make Ternary
• Use Named Boolean In Argument Definition
• Assigned Twice
• Locally Unused Property

...and many more. Some of the changes from May are pretty dramatic but others have stayed about the same. Check out the full post for the overview and links to more information about each of the checks.

On the Exakat blog there's a new post covering some of the impact that PHP versions have on codebases they've reviewed in the normal course of their product's analysis and the requirements of Open Source software.

With the upcoming PHP 7.3, the question of the next migration is back on our tables. We’ll hear a strange mix of begging to move to the new versions for features and security, mixed with a constant threatening that some old versions will soon be unmaintained or worse. Indeed, there is versions impact on PHP code bases.

Particular witnesses of that evolution are open source projects. They usually have to support a wide range of versions, and in the same time, are actively encouraged to use the newest features. It is a delicate work of balancing compatibility and progress.

To observe the way Open Source projects handle the evolution of PHP, we have audited 1977 Open source PHP projects, by linting them with PHP versions from 5.5 to 7.3. This taught us the impact of PHP on code, over a long period of coding. Let’s review them.

The post starts by talking about linting of PHP files (checking the syntax for issues but not executing the contents). It then shares some statistics about the number of Open Source projects that lint on every build and how it has trended over time. They also share some results on the age of packages that are in wide use, showing that the ration of "old code" to "young code" is surprisingly similar.

The php[architect] podcast, hosted by Eric van Johnson and John Congdon, has posted their latest episode: Episode #11 with a different format that before.

After a summer holiday, Eric van Johnson and John Congdon return with a new format.

Topics in this episode include:

• conference speaking
• static analysis with external services
• code quality and compliance tests
• domain driven architecture

Eric and John are also joined by guests Oscar Merida and Barney Hanlon to chime in on these topics. You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page audio player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you enjoy the show, be sure to subscribe to their feed for updates when future shows are released.

php[architect] magazine has shared another article from their April 2018 issue on their site. In this article Ondrej Mirtes covers the use of static analysis to help testing and inform you of type safety issues.

When developing an application, our aim as software developers is to make sure it does what it ought to do and to keep the number of defects as low as possible. [...] In this article, I’d like to introduce you to the concept of type safety and how it can improve the reliability and stability of your code. Once your code is more type-safe, and that fact is verified by automated tools, you can cherry-pick which parts of your application need extensive unit tests and where you can rely just on well-defined types.

He starts off by talking about types (strict and dynamic) in PHP and the current state of the typing system for variable values. He covers the role of good type hinting in method and function definitions and how it can help IDEs like PhpStorm locate issues. He also talks about how type hints can provide you feedback on the design of the application and some of the tools that can help you find issues.

He wraps up the article with some tips for making your code more strongly typed and a look at what kind of tests are needed to help ensure these types remain enforced.

With the final release of PHP 7.2 coming on the horizon the Exakat blog wants to be sure you and your code are prepared for some of the changes. In this new post they share things to change and improvements to expect in this latest version of the PHP language.

PHP 7.2 is around the corner, and shall be out soon, thanks to the hard work of @RemiCollet), Sara Golemon (@saramg) and countless others that run tests and submit bug reports. PHP 7.2 is already RC6, and the documentation has even been updated : it is high time to get ready for PHP 7.2.

We have been hard at work, at @Exakat, to prepare the migration analysis. This is our take on this upcoming task.

He's broken the changes coming down into a few categories based on the actions required and what you can do to prepare: Know, Lint, Static (Analysis), Unit testing and Logging. A chart is then included showing each of the changes, which category they fall into and links to more information about them and what has been updated (or added).

On the Exakat.io blog there's a post continuing on from a "dos and donts" article about programmer practices. In this new post cover some of the rules in a bit more detail from the original article.

Last week, I ran into ‘PHP Dos and Don’ts aka Programmers I Don’t Like‘ on reddit’s PHP group. It features a list of 11 points that the author hates finding in PHP code. [...] The most interesting point is that coding references are used to asses code. They may very well be automated, thanks to static analysis. I thought it was a good challenge for Exakat.

The list covers several of the rules in the list, providing a brief explanation (and a bit of how it relates back to PHP) including:

• Unnecessary casting
• Extra bracket and braces
• Lack of coding standard
• Too many nested if statements

He ends the post with a bit of detail about how the Exakat service is checking for these "failures" in it's newer "RadwellCode" report. He even gives the scores of some of the more well-known and used PHP projects including the Zend Framework (v1.12), WordPress, Composer and even Exakat itself.