In looking to test his fputscsv functionality, David Otton found a simple way to measure its performance by using streams.

Then I realised I could use PHP's (fairly) new IO streams to dump the function's output to a temporary buffer, and read it back in for comparison. Not perfect, but it removes concerns about file mutexes, permissions, unique filenames, etc. and speeds up the tests, as they never touch disc.

He uses a custom stream and points it to php://memory to store and read the data from. Code is included in the post as well as example usage. It runs an assert that the value pushed into another memory chunk is the same as the first one (ensuring that the results of his fputcsv calls are valid).

Following up on the start of his port of the Hamcrest (a library of "matchers") functionality over to PHP, Sebastian Bergmann has posted the getting started guide to show you how to use it with the popular PHPUnit unit testing software.

There are a number of situations where matchers are invaluble, such as UI validation, or data filtering, but it is in the area of writing flexible tests that matchers are most commonly used.

His example that checks to see if one object is equal to another object. The Hamcrest matcher allows for a "assertThat" method making it easier to create and use pre-existing unit testing assertions.

He also includes a list of some of the most common matchers broken up into groups of core, logical, object, number and text.

Tony Freixas has posted a new article covering his thoughts on high-performance debugging with PHP5:

In this article, I will show you how to use PHP 5 input filters to support debug, trace and assert statements so that a one-line change disables these statements and restores your script to full production performance.

He makes a custom solution, a simple method for just outputting simple debug statements via his own custom debugging classes - thDebug, theTrace and thAssert. He wraps all of these in a thDebugManager class to make them all play nice together.

With these in place, he moves on to the real key to the debugger, using the input filter extension that comes with PHP5. He makes a thAbstractStreamFilter abstract class to base the filtering on and, using this interface, makes his thDebugFilter class to handle the various debugging outputs. He uses the __autoload functionality to load it correctly into each page that needs it.