Mike Willbanks as put together a new post talking about continuous integration with Atlassian's Bamboo software and getting it to cooperate with the needed PHP tools to round out your deployment (like PHP Depend, PHP Code Sniffer, PHP Mess Detector and PHPUnit).

Continuous integration is all the rage these days; you are unit testing your code are you not? During some consulting in January with the help of Sebastian Bergmann, from thePHP.cc, we setup continuous integration utilizing Atlassian Bamboo and received training on PHPUnit. Using Atlassian Bamboo for continuous integration will take you a bit to setup, however, I have found it to be an invaluable tool when utilizing the Atlassian stack (JIRA, Confluence, Crucible, Bamboo and Crowd).

He walks you through the process of getting the PHP tools installed (from PEAR packages) and includes links to two Bamboo plugins to help gather some metrics on the deployment process. He talks about the actual build tool (they went with ant), setting up the locations for where output and external dependencies will be stored and includes the ant build.xml file they use to tie it all together.

The ZendCasts.com site has recently posted a quick video covering logging and Doctrine event listeners in a Zend Framework application.

This short video is going to be the last in my 2009-2010 series on Doctrine 1.2. I'm wrapping it up with a little example of adding timestamps, logging and using Doctrine's event listener architecture.

The tutorial shows you how to pull in the features of Doctrine to make it easier to create a more complex logging system. He shows how to set up the schema file, add in controller functionality and backend models to make things all work together happily. You can get a copy of the project he's building from his subversion repository.

Benjamin Eberlei has a new post to his blog today pointing you to some PHP & Hudson CI integration resources that can help you get this powerful combination up and running for your deployment process.

Although phpUnderControl is the most wide-spread, but from I heard complex to setup/maintain, solution supposedly a hack and Arbit just in an early Alpha I decided to give Hudson a shoot. Another reason for this decision, I heard it has a simple plugin architecture and is easy to install and use.

He moved away from his own bash script-based CI setup towards something a bit more technical, something that would give him a bit more control over running unit tests, create code coverage, etc. He lists three sites that helped him get his Hudson install up and running and another is mentioned in the comments.

Richard Thomas has another Solar Framework Short posted today looking at how to integrate the jQuery Javascript library directly into your Solar application.

When it comes to Jquery integration you have 2 main uses. Calling a php function from a website or calling Jquery functions from php both are done through an XMLHttpRequest.

By extending a jQuery-related controller, you gain some special automatic abilities like automatic json-ification of output data and being able to push out transformations directly back to the browser from a standard javascript call. Check out the post for the complete source code for his example.

Dave Gardner has posted an excellent guide to getting Hudson (a continuous integration server) working together with a Phing deployment instance for your PHP applications.

In this, my first post, I'm going to write about the benefits of Unit Testing and how Continuous Integration (CI) can be used to get the best out of Unit Testing. This will include details of how I setup a CI system using Hudson CI server, Phing build tool combined with various other analysis tools (including PHP Unit).

All of the details are there - definitions of the terms involved (like "CI" and "unit test"), the steps to install both Hudson and Phing, installing some of the more popular PHP tools (PHPUnit, PHP_CodeSniffer, PHP_Depend) and setting up the configurations for both the Hudson install and Phing to run their four step deployment process.

Ladislav Prskavec has posted a step-by-step guide on getting Hudson (a Java-based continuous integration server) working with PHP.

Hudson is extensible continuous integration engine used for Java projects. It's architecture can be used for others languages as PHP too.

The guide links you to the files and packages you'll need to get PHP support installed (including a few different plugins), a sample build script for a build tool like Phing and an example Hudson configuration to tie them together. The Phing process is executed in a shell to run unit tests, build documentation and check the syntax on all files in the current repository.

Davide Mendolia wrote in to let me know about a new site he's started to gather as much information about continuous integration in PHP into once place as he can - PHP-CI.net.

The goal of this website is to provide information for doing continuous integration in PHP and also hosting of continuous integration process for open source software. [...] On this site you will find information about continuous integration in PHP, be able to ask an hosting of your project and consult the result of the execution of builds of project hosted.

You can also check out the blog for the project to get the latest updates on hosted projects (like their first - PHPIDS) and the Google Group he's set up for discussion.

On the Ibuildings techPortal site today there's a new tutorial from Marc that introduces the phpUnderControl continuous integration system for PHP projects.

In any decent sized project, the more times you commit code, the bigger the chance is that you will break something. [...] To deal with this we can either adopt the 'śrelease and pay'ť method of software control, or we can setup systems to help us find the consequences of our actions, so we that can correct them before they become a problem. We usually call these systems Continuous Integration systems.

He briefly covers what phpUnderControl is and what it can do for you before getting into the real detail - grabbing all the needed packages (including the eZ components graphing library), setting the system up and configuring it for a sample project. This includes setting up the XML configuration file and adding in PhpDocumentor/PHPUnit/PhpCodeSniffer. He adds in two "nice things to have" at the end - emailing when something breaks and setting up/tearing down a database as needed.

Stefan Koopmanschap has posted about his plugin he's created for the symfony framework that would allow it to handle continuous integration natively - symfonyUndercontrol

From the first moment I was introduced to the concept of continuous integration I have been really interested in this. I've been playing with several packages for CI and set them up for fun. One thing that kept bothering me was that I could not test my own symfony projects with it. I started working on the symfonyUnderControlPlugin a few months ago, and quickly had a working proof of concept. It wasn't perfect, but it did the job.

Strapped for time, he didn't get much chance to work on it until the company he works for (Ibuildings) gave them time to work on Open Source projects. The results is his preview release, version 0.0.1.

On the SitePoint PHP Blog Troels Knak-Nielsen points out some "cultural integration issues" he's seen when it comes to character encoding in his PHP applications.

The gold standard solution is to convert everything to utf-8. Since utf-8 covers the entire unicode range, it is capable of representing any character that latin1 can. Unfortunately, that's a lot easier to do from the outset, than with a big, running application. And even then, there may be third party code and extensions, which assume latin1. I'd much rather continue with latin1 being the default, and only jump through hoops at the few places where I actually need full utf-8 capacity.

He came up with a (relatively) simple solution - keep the information encoded in the latin1 he already has but serve up the pages with a utf-8 format, embedding utf-8 inside the latin1 when needed. He gives the code for both, making use of output buffering and the utf8 encoding functions to make it all work.