In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc shares a chapter from the recently released Jump Start PHP Environments from SitePoint publishing. You can order a copy of your own here.

This chapter will focus on the application environment. We’ll also discuss *AMP bundles such as XAMPP and why they’re a poor choice; production /development parity; and performance and debugging.

The remainder of the post is broken up into these main sections and also discusses topics like:

• the differences between development, staging and production
• the "machine pollution" that comes with the *AMP bundles
• optimization tips about databases, front-end tools and caching

If this sample chapter was useful to you, be sure to check out and order the full book from the O'Reilly store.

The Toptal.com blog has posted a new tutorial that wants to help you make the most of your application via testing. They show you how to use Codeception to create a set of tests to ensure your application is working as expected.

Before moving on to Codeception and PHP, we should cover the basics and start by explaining why we need testing in applications in the first place. Perhaps we could complete a project without wasting time on tests, at least this time?

Sure, you don’t need tests for everything; for example, when you want to build yet another homepage. [...] However, you definitely do need testing when: your team uses BDD/TDD, your Git repo contains more than a couple commits, [and] you are a proper professional, working on a serious project.

They start with a look at the kinds of things testing solves in your development process and the different kinds of tests you can create. From there they introduce Codeception, an alternative testing tool to the widely used PHPUnit. The tutorial helps you get it installed and shows you how to make a simple, first test. It helps you execute the test, debug issues that might pop up and the different assertions you can use. With the fundamentals in place, they move on to more details on using it for functional and unit testing.