Giorgio Sironi has posted a review of a book to his site that shares fifty quick ideas to improve your tests that can help with things like run time, ease of maintenance and following best testing practices.

Fifty quick ideas to improve your tests is, well, a series of fifty quick ideas that you can implement on some of your automated test suites to improve their value or lower their creation or maintenance costs.

These ideas are pattern-like in which they are mostly self-contained and often independent from each other. They are distilled from real world scenarios that the authors (David Evans, Tom Roden and Gojko Adzic) have encountered in their work.

He's included a few quotes from the book he found particularly interesting including mentions of:

• a pyramid of software quality levels
• misunderstanding that testing can somehow be completely replaced by a set of carefully chosen examples
• difficult testing is a symptom, not a problem
• the problem with time-based "sleeping" in tests

You can find the book itself over on Leanpub and can pick up your own copy for around $10 USD.

PHPClasses.org has posted their latest "Lately in PHP" podcast today with mentions of PHP 5.3.8 and some of the wrong ideas that are common when referring to PHP (from their previous post).

Another PHP 5.3 version was released. Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert discuss whether you should upgrade to this new version of PHP, as well if you should try the new PHP 5.4 beta version. They also talk about the repercussion of the article about the Wrong PHP Ideas You Should Get Right and why it is important to clarify PHP haters and lovers about these PHP misconceptions.

You can either listen to this latest episode through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 (25MB) or by subscribing to their feed and getting the latest right in your reader of choice (even iTunes).

In this new post, Jackson Miller mentions something that he thinks just might become a Ruby on Rails killer, Tapestry. Fortunately, there's already been a framework implemented with its ideas in mind - the PRADO Framework.

Howard Ship is the guy behind Tapestry which is one of the better component frameworks out there. In a post today he is drawing attention to PRADO which is a PHP component framework that is based on the ideas in Tapestry. I haven't checked out PRADO in a long time but it looks like they are still moving forward and making good progress.

Jackson also mentions the one thing that he really took from Howard's post, that he's "raising the bar" with a challenge that Tapestry will always be the leader in this realm, though.

In this new post, Jackson Miller mentions something that he thinks just might become a Ruby on Rails killer, Tapestry. Fortunately, there's already been a framework implemented with its ideas in mind - the PRADO Framework.

Howard Ship is the guy behind Tapestry which is one of the better component frameworks out there. In a post today he is drawing attention to PRADO which is a PHP component framework that is based on the ideas in Tapestry. I haven't checked out PRADO in a long time but it looks like they are still moving forward and making good progress.

Jackson also mentions the one thing that he really took from Howard's post, that he's "raising the bar" with a challenge that Tapestry will always be the leader in this realm, though.

In his latest post today, Greg Beaver is also taking a look at phpDocumentor and some of the documentation methods it allows, noting that providing the right notes on the "magic" functions has always been a point of difficulty.

One of the trickier feature requests for phpDocumentor has been documenting "magic" object properties and methods. By "magic" I am referring to properties and methods that are created dynamically by PHP 5.0+ userspace class methods __get, __set, __isset, __unset and __call.

He gives a code example of creating properties and a magic function (borp). To illustrate his point, he tries to specify the phpDocumentor format that would go with it - not an exact match, but with the help o ffour new tags it's made easier: @property, @property-read, @property-write, and @method.

In his latest post today, Greg Beaver is also taking a look at phpDocumentor and some of the documentation methods it allows, noting that providing the right notes on the "magic" functions has always been a point of difficulty.

One of the trickier feature requests for phpDocumentor has been documenting "magic" object properties and methods. By "magic" I am referring to properties and methods that are created dynamically by PHP 5.0+ userspace class methods __get, __set, __isset, __unset and __call.

He gives a code example of creating properties and a magic function (borp). To illustrate his point, he tries to specify the phpDocumentor format that would go with it - not an exact match, but with the help o ffour new tags it's made easier: @property, @property-read, @property-write, and @method.

In an effort to create a higher level of discussion on PHP than just the "why is this erroring?" or "how do I get PHP to..." questions, Davey Shafik has started a new channel over on the Freenode IRC network to futher talks about PHP and not just fixing other peoples errors.

The goal of the channel is to foster talks about topics such as design patterns, emerging PHP concepts, working on the bleeding edge, and new ways of doing old things. The channel is already set up and running smooth with users constantly around (though they might be just lurking), so come on over and join in.

In an effort to create a higher level of discussion on PHP than just the "why is this erroring?" or "how do I get PHP to..." questions, Davey Shafik has started a new channel over on the Freenode IRC network to futher talks about PHP and not just fixing other peoples errors.

The goal of the channel is to foster talks about topics such as design patterns, emerging PHP concepts, working on the bleeding edge, and new ways of doing old things. The channel is already set up and running smooth with users constantly around (though they might be just lurking), so come on over and join in.