We recently looked at front-end testing of web applications with Selenium. Today, we'll take another approach to testing your PHP applications: backend unit testing for your actual PHP code. As part of our posts on test driven development, here's a quick intro to using SimpleTest to test your PHP applications.

He introduces the SimpleTest software and shows what a sample test might look like for a simple math question (testing to see if the result of the addition is correct). He also points out a good tutorial on the SimpleTest website to help you get started.

My favorite PHP framework just got a new release, adding several new components and fixing 30-ish bugs. The bundled JavaScript libs (Prototype / script.aculo.us) have also been upgraded, so that should help lots of people struggling with the old versions.

You can download the framework from its website and, if you're new to it, check out the tutorial to get you started. Prado is a free PHP5-based rapid application development framework that doesn't go with the usual MVC format of most frameworks. It opts instead for "logic be stored in classes and presentation in templates".

If you are looking for a quick way to get started with the Zend Framework, then you should download this file. This download has a default setup for the Zend Framework, including: a conventional directory structure, a bootstrap file, configuration file with 2 stages: production, staging, an error controller, an index controller and more.

For course, you'll have to have the framework installed to get things up and running, but outside of that you'll only need to put the downloaded files above into the right place.

They list a few reasons why one might want to use the PEAR DB package over the normal PHP database functions before they get into the examples. There are four examples - making the connection, querying the database, what to do to avoid SQL injections, and updating your database with prepared statements.