Continuing on from his preamble on the integration of the PHPSpec BDD tool into the Zend Framework, Padraic Brady has posted the next in the series - a look at what it would take to make the integration happen.

The ideal was to move away from line-by-line setup and manipulation of Zend instances towards a more simplified model which is standardised for any PHPSpec specs.

He's already created an "experimental branch" to work inside of and some of these updates have been made to the trunk for the release of PHPSpec 0.3.0. The key that he found was in getting the customization of the "Zend Context operational to set up elements of the FrontController". He also includes a simple example of the extended functionality in action - simple interface methods to work with Twitter.

On his blog today Sebastian Bergmann has posted about new functionality that's been added to the PHPUnit unit testing package for PHP - support for BDD and Stories.

PHPUnit_Extensions_Story_TestCase is a new extension for PHPUnit that has been contributed by Xait, a company that I visited last fall. It adds a story framework with a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) for Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD).

He includes an example of the new extension in action - creating a Story, adding Steps to it and the output that would result from the execution (reading?) of the example.

Padraic Brady has posted a manifesto of sorts about the work that he's been doing on his PHPSpec library and trying to work it into the approval process for the Zend Framework.

I'll be attempting to pound the Zend Framework into submission so I can apply Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) using PHPSpec when I write a Controller. Why? Because I feel like it, and it gives me an excuse to promote one possible incarnation of PHPMock and the PHPSpec Zend Framework extension. See? Perfectly reasonable selfishness!

He hopes to move it past the typical test-driven development process that PHPUnit offers and "kick your ass into high-TDD gear" without having to have worked much with it before then (the key is simplicity).

He includes some code examples (how it should flow) and describes some of the challenges that he's coming across so far, specifically with the way that the Zend Framework works with the Controllers and what he wants to accomplish.