PHP.net has posted a wrapup of this year's TestFest and the great progress that was made to bring the language development up to the next level.

Overall 158 tests have been submitted as part of TestFest 2008 since the launch of the TestFest submission site by 30 different people from people all over the world. Actually this is not counting the various submissions by existing core developers, who also took this opportunity to add some more tests. This has actually increased total test coverage by about 10%.

It also mentions Felix De Vliegher who, because of his large volume of tests (and quality of them), was granted commit rights into the PHP repository to add his in himself. The list of elePHPant winners is included as well. You can also still submit tests through the TestFest submission site (just not for any of the rewards).

Rather than having a lots of different blog posts scattered all over covering this year's php|tek conference in Chicago, I figured that pulling them all together here would work best. So, without further ado - the coverage from php|tek 2008:

• the php|tek live site
• slides (as they get them
• Photos on Flickr tagged with "tek08"

• Ivo Jansch: Day -1, Day 0, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3 (and wrapup)
• Eli White: Heading to php|tek
• Greg Beaver: phar is near at php|tek
• Ivo Jansch's coverage of the Zend/Microsoft issue during Joe Stagner's keynote
• Brian DeShong's slides - The Grown-Up Company's Guide to Development and Robust Batch Processing with PHP
• Maggie Nelson slides - Keeping You DB and PHP in Sync, Angering the Database Gods
• Sebastian Bergmann's slides - Type-Safe Objects in PHP, Understanding the PHP Object Model, Quality Assurance in PHP Projects
• a wrapup of the conference from Ben Ramsey
• Matthew Turland's look back at the conferece
• Gennady Feldman's wrapup
• Maggie Nelson's slides for Angering the Database Gods
• a heads-up from Marco Tabini to look in the near future for some incriminating video of some php|architect staff in KISS outfits
• Jeff Moore's wrapup of this year's conference and links to his slides - Exceptional PHP and Coding for Success: Writing Software You'll Be Able To Understand Next Month
• Another recap by Andrew Culver
• slides from Greg Beaver - PEAR, Phar and Smart PHP
• slides from Ed Finkler's talks - Building Desktop RIAs with PHP, HTML & Javascript in AIR, Securing the PHP Environment with PHPSecinfo
• an overview from Christopher Jones

Check out more live from the conference on the php|tek Live page on the php|architect website.

As Antony Dovgal points out in a new blog post today, the latest reports on PHP's code coverage have jumped up over the 50% mark (to 56.3% at the time of this post).

It took us about 2 years to get the last 5% and I believe most of the kudos should go to IBM people, who continue to contribute lots of new tests. I hope that the Testfest will help us to speed up this process.

There are still a lot of items in the red that could use some tests, so if you're looking to help out write up some tests or check your area for a TestFest event to get some help.

Stoyan Stefanov has come up against one of the frustrations of web development involving cookies - problems caused by the switch from a "www." in the host to none. He's come up with a test to show you how cookies are set and where you can access them from.

One of the implications of following the rule is related to the whole www vs no-www question. Basically you should always use www if you're planning to use any other sub-domains and you want them cookie-free. This is because you have no way to set a cookie only to the top-level domain.

His code sets cookies for the ".phpied.com", "phpied.com" and "www.phpied.com" domains. Since the domains without the "www" offer a bit broader range of possible matches, he recommends that if you're ever going to use any kind of subdomain, you'll want to use the more broad cookie to cover it.

In a new post to the Debuggable blog, Tim Koschutzki talks some about the work he's been doing on the code coverage analysis for the upcoming CakePHP release:

There are several different kinds of criteria to code coverage. The two most important ones are line coverage (or statement coverage as wikipedia puts it) and path coverage. [...] So how is it going to work? Pretty simple actually. Whenever you run a CakePHP test case Cake assembles information in the background about which lines of your subject-under-test are called.

He includes a few screenshots of the code coverage being run and the end result of the runner with the percent covered.

In a new post to his blog today, Stuart Herbert continues the theme he started in a previous post about a business case for PHP. In this new entry, he shares some things he's done to further the effort.

To turn this from an idea into reality, I've setup a Google group where anyone who is interested can join in, and help build this resource. Please come along with your ideas and concerns, and let's see what we can achieve together.

He also suggests some "first steps" to get the ball rolling, namely a list of topics the business case needs to cover.

Christopher Jones has posted a new item today concerning code coverage and the OCI8 drivers in the latest release of PHP - version 5.2 - including some of the stats.

A week or so ago he [Nuno Lopes] enabled oci8 tests on PHP's Test and Code Coverage Analysis system. The PHP 5.2 Code Coverage numbers are in good shape for the oci8 extension. The work done on re-factoring the extension and its subsequent maintenance mostly by Antony Dovgal is commendable.

The resulting report shows the oci8 drivers topping the charts of amount of coverage with the SQLite drivers following in second place (later, he found the Berkly DB coverage came in second with 76.8%).

Sebastian Bergmann has a new post on his blog today with even more details on the reporting that's to come with the next version of PHPUnit, version 3.

When I moved to Norway just over a month ago, the Code Coverage Reporting of PHPUnit 3 needed almost six hours to run the test suite and generate a Code Coverage report for the eZ components.

Then Derick Rethans committed a patch to [...] reduce the time spent on running the tests dramatically. It now took only two hours to run the test suite and generate the report.

Over the past couple of days, Michael Lively Jr., Jan Kneschke, and myself optimized some hot spots in PHPUnit3 moving the initial six hours have been reduced to eight minutes.

Many congrats to Sebastian and the crew that helped make such a dramatic change in the code coverage report creation! He also notes there's a logger to come to manage the information gathered via the tests (into a SQLite database).

Stephen Kellett wrote in to let us know about some new software tools for working with PHP that are in beta testing now for the Windows environment.

Software Verification has released its PHP software tools into beta status. The software tools provide flow tracing, code coverage and performance profiling for PHP 4 and PHP5. No code modification is required. The software tools run on Windows NT 4.0, 2000, XP and above.

If you'd like to sign up and become a beta tester for this software, check out this page to contact them with your information.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted a new item today with examples of the improvements that he's made to the HTML output that PHPUnit 3 will offer.

Inspired by the layout of the Code Coverage Analysis for PHP that is generated using gcov and lcov, I decided to improve the out-of-the-box generation of HTML Code Coverage reports for the upcoming PHPUnit 3.

The screenshots show things like a new overall summary page, sub-rpoject summary pages, and coverage report examples.