Giorgio Sironi has a new post to DZone.com today about some of his experiences with Behat, a behavior-driven development testing tool written in PHP. It uses the Gherkin language syntax to define its tests.

I had the occasion to try out and adopt Behat for a particular need in our projects at Onebip. Here is my recount of the experience from a PHPUnit contributor and invested person.

He starts off with a list of situations where he doesn't think that Behat is a good fit for testing including testing of a single object and acceptance tests where comparing the response from more than one test is needed. He suggests that it's more useful for verifying high level business rules than anything. He talks some about the shift they made to using Behat and some of the benefits they found in its use. He finishes up the post by looking at the technical side and includes a warning about letting the size of the FeatureContext file get too large.

The latest issue of the Web & PHP Magazine has been released - Issue 8 - The Power of Design. Articles in this latest issue include:

• Todd Lombardo on user context
• Stefan Priebsch on data and persistence
• Patrick Allaert about data structures
• June Henriksen on the human side of programming

You can find out more about this issue (and go download your free copy) on the Web & PHP site. There's also seven previous issues, all free for download (PDF format)!

Nikita Popov has a new (language agnostic) post to his blog today about one of the most powerful things you can use in your development - something that a lot of developers don't understand the true power of - regular expressions.

As someone who frequents the PHP tag on StackOverflow I pretty often see questions about how to parse some particular aspect of HTML using regular expressions. A common reply to such a question is: "You cannot parse HTML with regular expressions, because HTML isn't regular. Use an XML parser instead." This statement - in the context of the question - is somewhere between very misleading and outright wrong. What I'll try to demonstrate in this article is how powerful modern regular expressions really are.

He starts with the basics, defining the "regular" part of "regular expression" (hint: it has to do with predictability) and the grammar of the expressions. He talks about the Chomsky hierarchy and how it relates to the "regular" as well as a more complex mapping of expression to language rules. He talks about matching context-free and context-sensitive languages and unrestricted grammars as well.

Joshua Thijssen has written up a new post for the Enrise blog today about using REST-style context switching in Zend Framework applications with the help of a handy "RestContextSwitch" helper.

In the first part of this blog post we've talked about the theory behind REST services. In this post we put the theory into practice with the help of some code snippets you can implement in your own application.

He starts by helping you create a simple REST controller (well, cut-and-pasteable code, really) that can handle multiple output formats/contexts - XML, JSON and HTML. Next up is the helper (Service_Controller_Action_Helper_RestContextSwitch) that's not much different than the normal context switching helper. With that in place he moves on to the plugins - an accept-hander that sets the correct format based on the Accept HTTP header information and a media-format plugin to check "permissions" on the context to see if that type is allowed in that environment.

Michelangelo van Dam has a new post to his blog today looking a a method for doing some context switching in his Zend Framework application to use jQuery in his app's static HTML output.

I had already build my apps using static HTML output generated by Zend Framework, so how could I add this richness to my apps without refactoring most of my code ? Simple, by using Zend_Controller_Action_Helper_ContextSwitch, ZendX_JQuery and some minor adjustments to my view scripts.

He includes some code (that's confirmed to work with ZF 1.10.3) using the contextSwitch method on a helper object that adds in the "json" type for the contexts that can be used for the responses. Then a new template is added for the type (like index.json.phtml for the json output). Make a change or two to your bootstrap file to add in the right jQuery helpers and your view is as simple as calling "$this->jQuery".

In doing some work with Zero (PHP in Java) and the Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools project, Ant Phillips had some troubles with multithreaded PHP processes and wanting them all to use the same BIRT instance insted of spawning their own.

The problem is that BIRT needs to be started once, and only once, in any given process. Once it has been started up, then it is plain sailing to load reports and render them to HTML. The BIRT runtime should be kept around until the process shuts down.

Two problems came up with this approach - if each PHP process makes its own BIRT process any settings/current data will be wiped out and the BIRT instance would go away whenever the PHP script finishes. He found something that solves both of these problems - the Zero Global Context. Its a "storage area" that can contain just about anything. He used it to store the BIRT runtime until its told to finish and die off.

The NETTUTS blog has another WordPress-related post today that looks at "context includes" - changing the look and feel of the postings based on the content type they're tagged with.

The great thing about WordPress is that it doesn't limit how content is displayed, but provides a 'framework' of ways to do so. Even better, it's possible to change the display according to the content. When writing this tutorial it was hard to explain what's going on... But the best way is this: the post will be displayed within the loop according to its content - or contextual differences. Either way, it's including specific files that match up to the category of the post.

There's plenty of code to go around introducing you to the parts of the typical WodPress install you'll be working with and some CSS to help you style the resulting changes. You can download the source and check out a live demo of the end result.

In an effort to get streams more out in the, er, mainstream, Wez Furlong has posted an example of some code for a common operation many use cURL for - posting to a remote script - but with streams.

Every time I search for the code snippet that allows you to do an HTTP POST request, I don't find it in the manual and resort to reading the source. So, here's an example of how to send a POST request with straight up PHP, no cURL.

The example uses stream_context_create, fopen, stream_get_contents and an Exception to send off the message from an inputted array to the remote server. Smaller things, like the Content-length header on the request, are automatically handled by the wrapper functionality. You can check out this page for more information on the wrapper functionality.