In a new post today, Padraic Brady talks about some of his experience with unit testing in PHP - specifically with two of the more popular testing applications - SimpleTest and PHPUnit.

The word is that SimpleTest is moving towards PHP5 in the near future which is great news for all Mockists in PHP. When I moved to PHP, SimpleTest became the main ingredient in many a coding session up to 2 in the morning but once PHP5 gained traction and I was seduced into leaving PHP4 behind I found myself relying more heavily on PHPUnit. Not that SimpleTest is anti-PHP5 in any way (only some small things and obviously E_STRICT giving it a heart attack), but more projects I didn't control leaned heavily towards PHPUnit once PHP5 took off.

He goes on to talk about some of the differences between the two pieces of software (including Mock Object support and Stubs) and his personal feelings on how each of them works in his development experience. His interest has leaned more towards needing the Mock objects, though, so he favors SimpleTest for doing just what he needs.

PHPUnit fans can finally rejoice that the latest version of their much loved PHP unit testing utility - PHPUnit3 - has finally been released as a stable download.

Sebastian Bergmann and his contributors are proud to announce the immediate availability of PHPUnit 3. This release is a major improvement to the popular open source testing solution for PHP applications. It includes new features and bug fixes. Further details about this release can be found in the ChangeLog.

In his newest blog post, Sebastian lists some of the main new features this release offers - mock objects, selenium integration, and code-coverage support. There's even a brief installation howto and some on how to upgrade from the previous PHPUnit 2.3 to the latest.

On the Zend Developer Zone site today, Cal Evans had a chance to talk with Sebastian Bergmann, the lead coder on the PHPUnit unit testing project for an interview:

Sebastian Bergmann works at eZ systems. In his spare time he wrote and maintains the PHPUnit project. (He's worked on other project but since that's what he's talking about at ZendCon, that's what we'll talk about)

The interview is only a few questions long, but it's interesting to see how Sebastian's talk will be heading. There'll be talk of PHPUnit 3 (still in beta), mock objects, and its integration with CruiseControl. Check out the post for more of the questions.

Joseph Crawford has posted some of his thoughts on the mock testing that the folks over at php|architect are offering to help people prepare for Zend's PHP 5 Certification Exam.

So are you getting prepared to take the new PHP 5 Certification Exam offered by Zend? I have yet to see any books released for the preparation like i did with the PHP 4 exam, however there is something new and very cool. php|architect offers a Mock Tesing Environment which is powered by Vulcan Web Testing System.

Joseph talks about his experience, noting how he took the test and some of the topics that it covered. He definitely suggests taking it, too, as it provides a good glimpse into what you can expect come exam day.

php|architect magazine has released a new tool related to the PHP5 Certification Exam to help anyone wanting to prepare themsevles for exam time a chance to see how well they'd do and what kind of questions are on the test - a new testing tool, the Vulcan Zend PHP Certification Mock Testing.

Vulcan is our brand-new mock testing system that enables you to verify your readiness for the new Zend PHP 5 Certification Exam.

Based entirely online, Vulcan gives you a quick, easy and effective way of testing your knowledge on the topics that count for the real exam.

They mention some of the features the testing has, including the same types of topics/question distribution/pass grade/etc and even gives you a breakdown of the topics you need to brush up on before the real exam. Best of all, it's only about $22.00 USD for a 10-credit pack (that's ten times to practice up on your skills and get as ready as possible for the exam).

If you're considering taking the exam, I'm not sure you could get a much better deal than this.

DevShed has concluded their series on ActiveRecord today with This new post, the end of the chapter from php|architect's Guide to Design Patterns.

This article, the second of two parts, helps you use design patterns to better organize how your web application interacts with a database. It is excerpted from chapter 14 of the book php|architect's Guide to PHP Design Patterns, written by Jason E. Sweat.

Databases usually just work, but failure is not unheard of. To make sure your code operates correctly under failure conditions, let's simulate a failure using a Mock Object, which stands in for the connection object.

They create the mock object and use it to test the ActiceRecord instance, including (as before) the unit testing code as well. They finish it off with examples of how to search for records and update the records that already exist.

In his latest post today, Sebastian Bergmann announces the upcoming release of the latest version of the widely popular PHP unit testing suite - PHPUnit 3.0.

These past few days I have been busy hacking on what will become PHPUnit 3.0, hopefully already in January 2006.

The hallmark feature of PHPUnit 3.0 will be its support for Mock Objects. PHPUnit's Mock Object implementation has been initially developed by Jan Borsodi of eZ systems AS and is inspired by jMock.

While working with the Unit Tests for the Zend Framework I noticed that PHPUnit previously had no support for skipping the execution of a test, for instance when a required PHP extension is not available. PHPUnit 3.0 introduces the PHPUnit2_Framework_Assert::markTestSkipped() to mark a test as being skipped.

Chris Shiflett requested support for the Test Anything Protocol (TAP) which I added in the form of a respective PHPUnit2_Framework_TestListener implementation.

PHPUnit has become the de-facto standard for unit testing with PHP, and it's great to see so many more improvements coming from it. It's also good to see that, through it's efforts with the Zend Framework, it's also found some places it was lacking and fixed them right up.