Squiz leading the way in global Open Source developments
Recent independent analysis confirms that standards compliant open source solutions are rapidly gaining acceptance at the enterprise level.
Australia’s largest supported open source software developer Squiz is leading the way in maintaining the highest PHP coding standards by developing and making freely available a package called PHP_CodeSniffer. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
PHP_CodeSniffer lead developer, Squiz Product Development Manager Greg Sherwood, says that “PHP_CodeSniffer has been embraced by the global open source and wider development community to check code violations against a defined set of standards and report any errors to developers. It does this by sniffing PHP, JavaScript and CSS files to ensure code remains clean and consistent while also helping to prevent those common semantic errors that developers can make.”
Following 12 months of development Greg recently released PHP_CodeSniffer version 1.2.0 to the developer community and it is packed with improvements and new features. Some of the highlights include support for checking CSS files, the ability to tell PHP_CodeSniffer to ignore selected parts of code, writing any report to a file and full support for the new PEAR coding standard. Greg wishes to thank everyone who tested alpha and beta releases over the last 12 months and also those who took the time to submit bug reports and contribute features.
With new products like the Squiz MySource Mini CMS appliance and the upcoming 4th generation Squiz CMS using such rich JavaScript interfaces, PHP developers have to move away from traditional server-side coding and improve their client-side coding skills. In early 2008 Greg added support for tokenizing JavaScript files so developers could ensure their client-side files also conform to coding standards. As Greg says “Having JavaScript support in PHP_CodeSniffer was a move to recognise this trend and we are now using it very successfully within Squiz to check for formatting and performance errors.”
PHP_CodeSniffer is released under the BSD License. Further information and file download at http://pear.php.net/package/PHP_CodeSniffer.
About Squiz
Squiz is an Australian owned private company delivering web content management solutions via offices throughout Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and Europe. Squiz is the author of MySource Matrix, a fully supported enterprise class open source content management system used by over 600 organisations globally across government and industry. For more information see www.squiz.net.au.
For further information Contact: Steve Walker T: (02) 8507 9900