On the Ibuildings blog today Lorenzo Alberton takes a look at the Zend Framework, specifically as to how it can mimic regular HTTP calls with the built-in components.

One of the unit testing best practices suggests to break dependencies, so you can test each component separately. The first problem that arises when you want to test controllers might be having a tighter control over the HTTP Request and Response objects.

This problem is overcome with the Zend_Test_PHPUnit_ControllerTestCase. The second problem it with calls to external resources (like models/databases or web services). This is the prime focus of the post and seceral blocks of code are included to make a class to emulate the HTTP responses you might get back from the service.