In a new post to his blog Chris Hartjes, promoter of all things testing, looks a a method for testing constructors - an effective way to validate the things that happen when your objects are generated.

If you have a PHP application that makes heavy use of objects (which is probably 95% of you reading this) then you will have objects with constructor methods in them. It is also very likely that there is some stuff going on in those constructors. So how do you test things like this?

He includes a sample constructor that creates a container, pulls out some configuration values and reassigns them to class properties. He first tests that these properties have been set correctly by mocking out the object and overriding the configuration settings in the (dependency injection) container.