In a new post to his site today Konstantin Kudryashov takes a look at two PHP testing tools and the differences/similarities between them - Mockery and Prophecy. Mockery is a mocking tool created by Pádraic Brady to make mocking simpler and Prophecy is more of a mocking framework, both for use in PHP unit testing.

Today I’ve been asked twice what’s the difference between Mockery and Prophecy just to suddenly discover that I didn’t clarify this aspect never before. Well, that’s about time. If we were to remove all the syntactical and implementation differences between two libraries what we’ll be left with is one really big conceptual difference and it’s the fact that in contradiction to Mockery, Prophecy puts messaging (aka how objects communicate) before structure (aka when objects communicate).

He starts with a sample class (the usual "calculator" example) and shows how it would look to mock it out with each tool, setting return values for both the "getRating" and "setRating" methods. He enhances the tests a bit more to include an event dispatcher and raising an event. The approach is similar, but Prophecy uses something called "message binding" to more effectively handle changes to the class under test.