PHPMaster.com has a new tutorial posted that introduces you to a build tool that's more common in the Java world but can easily support PHP projects, Apache's Maven.

Apache Maven is a build automation tool with the purpose of building, reporting, and creating documentation of projects. It builds projects using a Project Object Model (POM) and a set of plugins shared by all projects using Maven, thus providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds, you automatically know how all Maven projects build. [...] Through this article you will gain familiarity with Maven for PHP, and how to install and use the PHP-Maven plugin from the command line and in Eclipse.

The tutorial walks you first through the basic install of Maven and get you started with an example "settings.xml" file helping to set up the PHP-Maven plugin. They help you create your first project using the Archetype plugin and its related "pom.xml" file. The project already has a defined structure (similar to what you might see in a Composer-loadable PHP repo on Github) for the source of your app and the tests. They show you how to hook in PHPUnit and phpDocumentor for testing/dcumentation builds and, finally, how to integrate it all into Eclipse to allow for easier, in-IDE interactions.