7 posts tagged with "code quality"

If you are developing your own API (whatever the language) or if you need to consume some, Postman can be really handy.

Calling an API and getting the response is one thing, quite simple in fact, but a nice feature of Postman is the ability to validate the response like making sure the returned type is, f.i. application/json, the HTTP status code is 200, the response body is a JSON object (or an XML string), that the body contains some required information and so on.

You can also validate the response against a given schema to make sure the structure is well the one expected.

In this article, we'll use Postman like a unit test tool i.e. run checks on our own API and make a lot of assertions. This is improve the quality of your code by hightlighting potentials errors and, for any refactoring you'll do in the future, by running the tests again, you'll make sure you've not broken something; that you don't have any regression. Make sure you've not broken an API when you upgrade some code is gold.

A few years ago, I sold a software called aeSecure, which was a Web Application Firewall. In order to prevent my proprietary code from being picked up by someone who could then sell it, for example, I had developed an obfuscation script.

Since then, I've released a reusable version of that script: https://github.com/cavo789/php_obfuscator.

And what if, today, with artificial intelligence, this type of code was no longer of any interest? The aim of this article is to see if it's always a good idea to make your code unreadable.

For years now, I'm using https://github.com/jakzal/phpqa to run a lot of static analysis tools on my PHP codebase.

The list of available tools is huge; see by yourself: Available tools.

In this blog post, we will see how we can take advantage of all these tools and increase the quality of our scripts.

This article is the very short and straightforward version of PHP development in a devcontainer with preinstalled code quality tools. If you just want to follow a very few steps and get your PHP environment, this article is for you.

By following steps describe in this article, you'll obtain:

• A Docker PHP environment so you can code using vscode,
• The PHP composer package manager installed,
• A few static analysis tool like php-cs-fixer, phpcs, phpcbf, sonarlint and Rector installed
• A devcontainer ready-to-use environment.

Just follow the guide...

If there was only one, it would be Rector. Rector is extremely powerful and brilliant and, you know what, it's free!

Rector is a tremendous application to scan and automatically upgrade your codebase to a given version of PHP and this means, too, to inspect how you're coding.

Rector will look at every line of code, every loop, every conditional test, every function, every class in a PHP source code and suggest improvements.

In this role, it will not only detect improvements to my code (like a static analysis tool) but, and this is the biggest advantage for me, it will show me how I can become a better developer.

I REALLY LOVE RECTOR 💕

• Updated 2024-02-23, install Rector automatically
• Updated 2024-02-29, install Error Lens and Code Spell Checker

Let's imagine one of the following situations:

1. You are working with several people on the same PHP project and you notice that one or other person does not comply with your quality criteria when it comes to the layout of the code. You like to use four spaces for indentation, you want the brace that marks the start of a function to be on the line, you don't want to see any more useless spaces at the end of the line, ... and damned! you notice that some people don't care about this.

2. You are working alone on a project and don't want to lose time to configure your VSCode experience. You wish to start very quickly with a lot of tools already installed in VSCode so you can put your focus to the code, not the editor.

The ultimate solution: using a devcontainer in VSCode.

By using a devcontainer, you (and your team colleague) will use a preinstalled environment and everyone will have exactly the same. You'll save yourself a lot of time by not having to configure your system, and you'll be able to start coding straight away, supported by a range of quality analysis tools.

You are writing Markdown .md files (and you're so right) and you just wish to check (and autofix) some issues like having multiple blank lines, mixing bullet types (- and * in the same document), using a # title followed by ### (i.e. you forget the level ##) and many more.

There is a tool for this: Markdown lint and, a Docker image peterdavehello/markdownlint.

Let's learn how to use it.