On thePHP.cc blog today there's another post looking at an improvement in the latest release of the popular PHP unit testing tool, PHPUnit 4.0.0. In the post Sebastian Bergmann looks at test proxies.

One of the highlights of PHPUnit 4.0, which was released last week, is improved support for integration testing through so-called test proxies. [...] PHPUnit has had built-in support for stubs and mocks for quite some time. These stubs and mocks can be used in every context where an object of the original class is expected. As it should be, the code of the original class is not executed when a method is called on the stub or mock. [...] PHPUnit 4.0 introduces the concept of test proxies [...] to have an object that provides the same API for expectations as a mock object while at the same time proxying method calls to the original class.

He includes some code examples to help illustrate. He creates a "SimpleWorkflow" class and shows how to test the execution of its "doWork" function to return the correct kind of "Result".