Following in the heels of his first post looking at a few of the templating offerings available to PHP applications, Gonzalo Ayuso is back with part two - a comparison versus just "plain PHP".

In my last post I created a small (and very personal) test of different templating engines in PHP (Smarty, Haanga and Twiw). Someone posted a comment asking for the comparison between those template engines and old school phtml. OK I’ve done some tests. It’s a bit difficult to create the template inheritance (without cloning one of the template engines and creating a new one) so I have one approximation with a simple include. It’s not the same but it’s similar.

He tries to recreate a similar scenario as in the three other templating tools by setting up a base template (with inline PHP), a class to populate the contents of it and a sample template with "inheritance". He stacks up the execution times and memory usage against the results from the other three with interesting results, specifically compared to Haanga.

The Zend Developer Zone has another new tutorial from Padraic Brady talking about testing your applications (i.e. unit tests). In this new article, he expands on his previous one and dives a bit deeper into the behaviour-driven development process.

In this article, I introduce a TDD related practice called Behaviour-Driven Development which has been gathering attention for over a year and gaining converts (like me!).

He briefly covers what BDD is and how it can be used to solidify code against issues that might come up down the road (and how it compares to test-driven development). Some sample code/tests are included to give you a better idea of how it all fits together - a set of scenarios for any given "story". True to the title, Padraic writes his tests around the construction of a Klingon Bird of Prey ship.