In a new post to his blog today Johannes Schluter talks about a plugin for the NetBeans IDE that allows you to run tests for PHP's regression test suite right in the editor.

The test system therefore produces a bunch of files, a file containing the expected output, one containing the actual output and a diff between these as relevant files. The problem there is that the diff, for being portable, is using a quite simple mechanism which only shows the lines which differ without any context.

[...] Lately I've changed my way of working and use vim less, I still use it, but I use NetBeans as an IDE more and more. So I thought a bit about that test issue and searched my brain for my Java skills and started playing around to see whether I manage to write a NetBeans plugin which can run the tests and report the results in a usable way.

Hes created a project for the plugin (where you can download the latest version - 0.6.0) and install it to your local IDE copy. It adds a toolbar icon, asks for the location of the binaries to test and runs the diff quickly and easily. You can see a screenshot of the tool in action here.