I just put the finishing touches on the first release of a new tool that will help me when working on WordPress plugins like ComicPress Manager: Harmonious Code, the PHP static code version checker. The tool looks at the functions & constants being used in your copied and pasted PHP code and reports back what version of PHP and what PECL modules you need installed. It gets the version information straight from the PHP documentation. It’s very rough at the moment, and I know the accuracy can be greatly improved, but it’s functional for what I need it to do right now, which is make sure the next few releases of ComicPress Manager continue to work on PHP 4.

Not only was this project geared toward building a useful tool, but it was a way for me to learn haXe, a very interesting and young Web programming language that compiles to a VM called Neko, to PHP, to JavaScript, and to ActionScript. I’m still learning, and the language is still evolving, but it seems to be a pretty good fit so far. I hope to work in it some more down the road. I must warn you, the code is probably not the best-looking code in the world at the moment.

So if you do PHP development, try out Harmonious Code and let me know what you think. You can download a local copy of the browser-based analyzer for yourself, and you can grab the source code off of GitHub.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 17th, 2008 at 8:12 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.