Mike Lively has posted about functionality he's created to add database testing procedures to preexisting PHPUnit tests supplementing his other post n adding database support to PHPUnit.

When I was first creating the Database Extension for PHPUnit I realized that there was a very high likelihood that several people would have tests that were already written that they would like to add additional database tests too. To accomplish this I actually wrote the PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_DefaultTester class. In fact, if you were to look at the source of the database test case you will see that all of it's operations are actually forwarded to this class which does all of the work.

He includes his same example from before - the banking system - and shows how the tests can be appended on, adding a getDatabaseTester method that returns an object the rest of the tests can use.

DevShed continues its look at using the GD graphics library in PHP with the second part of the tutorial series, this time focusing on the creation of images from existing images (and their streams).

As I stated at the end of the previous article of this series, the GD extension comes packaged with many other useful functions, which indeed deserve a close and detailed look. Thus, in this second tutorial I'll show you how to create different types of image streams from existing graphics, but in this case limiting the process to building GIF, JPG and PNG images.

They work through each of the types (GIF, JPG and PNG) creating an new one from a previous "clouds" image of the same type (a GIF out of a GIF, a JPG from a JPG, etc).

Well, according to Soledad Pendaes, PHP will never have a (real) Rails-like framework because of some of the limitations with objects inherent to the language.

I know the title is harsh but it's so true. At least it is according to nowadays php's implementation of classes and objects, which do not permit to "reopen" and add or redefine new methods to an existing class definition, which is the basis upon Rails (and I presume lots more of applications and frameworks) is built.

The post goes on to talk about they "why" behind the statement - basically that this kind of functionality makes it easier to "Extend. Morph. Adapt. Improve. Refine." your applications. She talks some about other frameworks that have tried to offer the same kinds of functionality Rails does (CakePHP and Symfony) but notes that they still have their limitations (in specific, mentioning CakePHP's AppModel functionality).

In this new blog post, Stoyan Stefanov shares a method he's found to reuse an existing database connection with the MDB2 library.

This is a follow up to a question posted by Sam in my DB-2-MDB2 post. The question was if you can reuse an exisitng database connection you've already established and not have MDB2 creating a second connection.

He gives two different methods, one for persistent connections and the other for non-persistent ones - including some code.

According to this new post on Andi Gutmans' blog today, the adoption of PHP versions seems to be tipping in favor of PHP5.

PHP 5 was released in July 2004. Since its release two years ago, there has been a lot of talk about its adoption rate and whether it will surpass the PHP 4 installed base. No doubt that it will still take some time for PHP 5 to reach PHP 4's existing installed base. The main reason for this are the numerous PHP 4-based applications that were built over the years, and if it's not broken, don't fix it.

He includes a graph showing the adoption of both PHP4 and PHP5 versions, noting a large increase from the release of the 5.1 version of PHP.

Although I knew many were waiting for PHP 5.1 before upgrading, its release in last November seems to have created a huge increase in PHP 5 adoption. In July over 74% of support tickets were by customers using PHP 5 (and remember we do support both versions).