On the Web Builder Zone (part of DZone) Giorgio Sironi has a new article talking about new features in the latest release of PHPUnit including one of his own introduction - the MockBuilder to make mocking in tests simpler.

The official release of PHPUnit 3.5 is now available for PEAR installation, after a long beta period. PHPUnit 3.5 provides many new features such as a bunch of new assertions methods and annotations, and a little but very useful contribution of mine: the MockBuilder. [...] As you may know, the 3.4 Api contains a getMock() method with 7 arguments. Since some of this arguments are booleans, a call to getMock() can get very obscure if you don't memorize the meaning of all the 7 arguments. [...] The Builder creational pattern is a small layer of abstraction over the instantation process, that [...] gives you a clear Api.

He includes a few examples of both the "getMock" function call and its "getMockBuilder" relation. He also includes a full sample class that shows off some of the other new improvements to PHPUnit like new assertions on variables and object attributes, the "instanceof" checks and the MockBuilder once again.