Sebastian Bergmann has posted about the latest release of the popular unit testing framework for PHP, PHPUnit 3.2.

I have just released a second release candidate for PHPUnit 3.2, the next major version of the xUnit testing framework for PHP.

According to the Changelog, updates in this new Release Candidate include a number of updates to the software metrics that can be run on code (at project, file, function, class and method level), the addition of DbUnit, code coverage improvements, bug fixes to the TestUI test runner and Selenium integration and much more.

On his blog today, Mike Lively has posted about the work h's done to create a database extension for the popular unit testing software for PHP, PHPUnit.

For those that may not have read any of my previous postings on the subject the goal of this software is to extend the functionality of PHPUnit to allow using seed data to put a given database into a known state prior to executing each test. It also provides an easy mechanism to compare database contents with an expected dataset.

Mike has just completed the initial feature set for his project - more or less a port of DBUnit over to PHP. The post includes not only details about this initial release but also code that demonstrates its use. In his example, it's used to validate that a bank account has been created properly by comparng database information before and after the insert.

Mike Lively shares some info about a project he's been working on in a new post to his blog today - a port of Java's DBUnit functionality over to PHP to work happily with PHPUnit:

For those of you not familiar with DBUnit, it is a framework that allows you to easily and quickly test php code that modifies and works with database data. [...] With database code this [testing] is somewhat difficult because you have to ensure that your database is in a known state prior to running your tests.

He gives two examples, the first illustrates the difficulty that can come up when trying to test the database information with a normal unit test and the second an example of the same, but using his port of PHPDBUnit to delete information from the database. It uses two XML files in the test - one to seed the database and the other to give the expected export information.

Check out his post for more details on the port from Java and keep an eye out for a beta release of the library as soon as July.