Cast Analyzer Adds Support for PHP

Software analysis company Cast has announced PHP application support for its SaaS-based Highlight product.

With an "inspect, analyze, and rationalize" mantra to bring to the firm's application portfolio, PHP analyzer joins a list of languages supported by this code-quality-as-a-service offering.

This release also includes a beta version of a new automation toolkit for sync portfolio analysis that can aid in the reporting process to development schedules without the need for human intervention.

Cast's Pete Pizzutillo explains that version 1.7 allows developers to look at the client- and server-sides of any PHP-powered web application. "For organizations building software or cloud services that depend on a browser experience, the ability to dynamically measure the risk across their entire IT portfolio is crucial to containing costs, heightening reliability, and understanding productivity," he said.

Highlight 1.7 sets out to create what Cast likes to call a "meaningful inventory" of high-level analytics on each application. Development team managers and CIOs can compare their applications against objective industry benchmarks that have been developed by Cast over the past 20 years, culled from over 1,000 applications.

The cloud-based SaaS nature of this tool means that it can be (in theory) quickly deployed by downloading an analysis agent from a secure site — eliminating the need for dedicated infrastructure or moving source code from its repositories.

Crucial portfolio stats and health status are displayed in a dashboard so that users can rationalize a cost-effective development strategy and decide which applications should be targeted. Additional dashboards show the top-10 riskiest applications in the portfolio and the technical debt of each, arming IT leaders with metrics that help them understand how their teams are performing, and whether or not they're providing quality code or hiding risk.

In addition to its PHP analyzer function, Highlight also supports C, C#, C++, Java, VB, .NET, COBOL, ABAP, VB6, PL/SQL, TSQL, PL1.