On the VG Tech blog today there's a new post introducing Selenium testing to those that might not have heard of it before for functional testing. It's a powerful tool that can even be used from inside PHPUnit tests to automate evaluation of your frontend application.

When we develop code at VG we have started to use Selenium tests for continuous integration. This allows us to easy write tests that programmatically checks that last commit didn't break anything.

He describes some of the types of tests Selenium can do and mentions the IDE that can hook into Firefox and record your actions and translate them into tests. This includes the ability to export them to PHPUnit tests (sample code provided) that extend the "PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase." An example screenshot of what the IDE running looks like is also included.

Matt Frost has posted a two part series of some of his experiences in setting up Selenium to execute it in a VM and run tests on your application.

I was a little scared when it came to setting up Selenium, I figured it was going to be difficult to setup and configure. So I was pleasantly surprised when it really wasn't. So here are a few of the mistakes I made; since I use Vagrant to do all my development I actually grabbed Selenium and started from there. Not a good place to start, although as I found out later; not a total dead end.

He includes the initial setup of things like PHPUnit and the Selenium .jar file as well as a sample test that loads a page and checks the title of the page. His second post shows how to set it up in the VM (using Vagrant, xvfb to capture the output and Firefox to execute the tests).

PHPClasses.org has posted their latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast series, Is PHP 5.4 really coming soon?

On the episode 12 of the Lately in PHP podcast, Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss the latest developments and what is still stalling the progress of the developments needed to make PHP 5.4 happen.

They also have a bit of discussion about which browser is better for development - Chrome or Firefox (and the places Chrome might be lacking). You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 to listen at your convenience.

Christoph Dorn has a new post to his blog today about using the FirePHP extension for Firefox/FireBug to help debug applications running on the Magenting service.

FirePHP can be useful when debugging remote PHP applications on shared or dedicated servers. This tutorial illustrates how to setup FirePHP 1.0 on Magenting which is a managed Magento hosting service. Go to http://magenting.com/ and create an account. This tutorial was prepared by using a Spark account, but it should work just the same with all plans.

He walks you through all the steps you'll need - getting the FirePHP extension installed, getting the PHP libraries set up on the remote server and configuring it to work with your application. A snippet of code is included that can be used to test the connection.

Derick Rethans has posted about some new browser extensions for the popular PHP-based debugger Xdebug. These are to replace the helper that is no longer available on FireFox's site (download).

Years ago I wrote about a Firefox extension that allows you to start an Xdebug debugging session by clicking on an icon in Firefox' status bar. For some unexplained reason, this extension is no longer available through Firefox' addon-site. [...] There are now a few other browser extensions that do the same thing.

He lists three new extensions that can most of what you'd need to keep your testing going - easy Xdebug, Xdebug enabler (for Chrome) and this blog post with a pure Javascript method done with bookmarklets.

On the Symfony blog there's a new post following up on the previous article about the FireSymfony debugging plugin. Previously, they introduced the tool - this time they look at the actual installation and configuration.

In the previous post we went through the features provided by FireSymfony. In this post we are going to see how to install the Firefox Add On and the symfony plugin.

Installing the Symfony plugin is simple - a standard plugin:install command and a bit of tweaking on the factories.yml file to add it to the logging settings. The FireFox extension installs like normal - grab it from here and install like any other extension.

In this new post to his blog, Sameer shows how you can push content with the xpi content type out from your PHP scripts (for things like a Firefox toolbar/extension).

A couple of days back I created a Firefox toolbar for my blog as an experiment in learning XUL. Once installed on my blog I wanted Firefox to recognize it as an addon and install it rather than displaying a ’save/open’ dialog.

Since his hosting provider (GoDaddy) didn't seem to work with adding it into an .htaccess file (an AddType for Apache), he had to force the download type with a few calls to header with the right content type, file size and file name to push it to the user.

On the PHPClasses.org blog today Manuel Lemos has taken a look at how big the PHP market is - how many developers there are and what kind of tools those developers might be using.

Even knowing that only a fraction of the PHP developers in the world will come to a given PHP event, the more PHP developers there are, greater is the chance to have more developers coming to the event. Therefore the first big question is: how large is the PHP developer community world wide? This is a difficult question. Zend has been publishing rough estimates of the number of PHP developers that exist in the world.

According to some estimates, there's over five million PHP developers out there. The PHPClasses site has this tool that can help show the distribution of some of these in user groups. Manuel also shares some stats he's gathered off of his site - a growing trend for visitors to use Linux and OSX as compared to Windows and the predominance for developers to use Firefox over Internet Explorer.

Other tools mentioned include FirePHP, a Javascript Debugger.

In this new post Juozas Kaziukenas takes a look at a very useful debugging tool that can help keep your debug messages and errors out of your page and into a proper debugger - FirePHP (an extension of Firebug).

One may debug his application with print(") statements all other the place or alert(") for JavaScript. Luckily some years ago Firebug extension for Firefox was introduced, which introduced (?) console. Console works absolutely the same as in Linux and can be used not only to execute commands, but receive information from various sources.

He shows what the output looks like both on the interface side (in the Firefox plugin) and in the HTTP headers that are sent back along with the web server's response. Some frameworks even have components that let you interface with it directly.

NETTUTS.com has posted their top ten list of some of the largest milestones in web development - one of which is the release of PHP.

Some believe the progression of the great World Wide Web to be a travesty, others a godsend. Regardless, the Internet has evolved over the past few decades, and is in many ways better for the web developer. New technologies have come about that have made web development much easier to get started in, and ultimately more fun.

Here's a few from their list:

• Linus Torvalds Creates the Linux Kernel
• The Open Source Movement Officially Starts
• PayPal is Founded
• Firefox is Released
• and, of course, PHP is Released by Rasmus Lerdorf