PUBLIC MARKS with tags clevermarks & pear

While still messing around with the PHP_CodeSniffer Pear package, I took a somehow jealous 1000 feet look at some prominent code inspection tools of the Java community: PMD and Checkstyle. Browsing their available rule sets/checks I soon recognized that guaranteeing the coding standard adherence is just a partial aspect of these tools. The following post will focus on one of these additional aspects, which is finding problems related to the code size of the inspected code artifacts, by showing how to port two selected rules to sniffs for utilization with the PHP_CodeSniffer tool. These ported sniffs can be used to automatically spot obvious code smells in the code base and to signal the need to apply the appropriate and odour reducing activity known as refactoring. Further more a complete set of code size sniffs, going beyond the trageted realm of the sniffs to come, could be used to speed up the feedback loop and to reduce the effort for manual code reviews.

Logging PHP and JavaScript errors to same window makes debugging easier

HTML_AJAX ships with a slightly modified version of the Behaviour javascript library.

Structures_DataGrid and DB_DataObject are two PEAR components, which can be connected together, to easily display the data contained in a SQL table, and let the user sort and page through it. By cleverly using these two components, and with minimal typing, I will try and show you how you can bypass the usual steps of parsing GET parameters, performing SQL requests, and generating HTML content.