On the Developer Tutorials blog, there's a recent example of how to validate a common task of many signup forms - if the email sent is actually received.

For any web developer that's ever had to build a signup routine, email is the necessary evil that takes pride of place among hated activities. Sure, a simple call to the language's mail library will send a message through, but the moment the boss wants a HTML email, or users need attachments, everything starts to get tricky.

They try to solve the mail return issue (it tells if the message has gone to the queue, not been delivered) with a little testing and Fakemail. The software looks for emails based on the configuration given and pulls them out to a local directory. Your script can then look here and check the validity of the message before its sent.

This even allows for integration with things like Phing, SimpleTest and Selenium.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted about the latest release of the popular unit testing framework for PHP, PHPUnit 3.2.

I have just released a second release candidate for PHPUnit 3.2, the next major version of the xUnit testing framework for PHP.

According to the Changelog, updates in this new Release Candidate include a number of updates to the software metrics that can be run on code (at project, file, function, class and method level), the addition of DbUnit, code coverage improvements, bug fixes to the TestUI test runner and Selenium integration and much more.

Sebastian Bergamnn spotlights one of the features of the upcoming version of PHPUnit (a unit testing software suite for PHP) - the Selenium integration. Specifically, he looks at improvements made to the SeleniumTestCase extension.

Probably the most important improvement to SeleniumTestCase is the fact that you can now run each test using a set of browsers instead of just one browser. [...] Other improvements to SeleniumTestCase include more robust error handling and better error messages.

To illustrate the "run each test in multiple browsers" feature, Sebastian includes the code for a test that runs three times, once for three different types of browsers - IE, Safari, and Firefox.

From the Zend Developer Zone, there's a tutorial covering acceptance testing of web applications, specifically using PHPUnit and Selenium.

In this article I introduce the topic of Acceptance Testing (aka Functional Testing), something more PHP programmers should be starting to practice. I'm sure many of us are well aware of Unit Testing and even Integration Testing so where does this third wheel come into play for web applications given our growing obsession with Web 2.0 and AJAX and how does it differ from the former two practices? Below I'll explain this.

They start by asking "Why acceptance testing?" at all with an answer of "it's not about isolated testing, but testing as a whole". The rest of the article is broken up into several parts:

• Of User Stories and Acceptance Tests
• The Iteration Plan
• Preparing For Acceptance Testing (setting up PHPUnit and Selenium)
• Writing And Running The Acceptance Tests
• How to run the tests

In their example they show how to validate that a login on the site works as expected (including interacting with a form on the page).

Sebastian Bergmann has posted an update of the status of the PHPUnit project to his blog today including feature additions to PHPUnit 3.1 and ones being added to other branches.

The last weeks have been busy, but now I want to take the time to finally give you an update on the status of PHPUnit. The development of PHPUnit 3.1 is progressing nicely, about the only thing missing is finishing the documentation for all the new features

Among these new features are things like:

• improvements in mock objects
• the ability for PHPUnit to write code coverage information to a test database
• some fun new template methods
• and mutation testing that's being built on the separate branch

From the "PHP in Action" blog, there comes this guide to integrating SimpleTest to make for even more complete testing of your applications.

From reading all this, you might get the idea that you can't run Selenium from SimpleTest. That's not the case. All you need is to call the PEAR package Testing_Selenium directly. It's slightly more typing than an API that is built into the test framework, but it won't kill you.

They list the steps you'll need to follow to get things working, but don't provide much more than that. There's a simple script included that you can test the installation with that makes a request to Google for the term "hello world design patterns" and asserts two different patterns to look for.

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.

In his latest post, Sebastian Bergmann mentions the work he's done to integrate Selenium with PHPUnit to make a powerful testing platform.

Today I committed the initial work for integrating Selenium RC with PHPUnit. In this case it is PHPUnit that drives the execution of the web application UI tests, using PEAR's new Selenium package to communicate with the Selenium RC Server.

He includes an example of how it will be used, creating a test to check if a page's title is equal to "Example Web Page".

In an effort to improve the way that he's writing web applications, Felix Geisendörfer has looked around him and found some good tools to "help him on his way to agility" in his programming. In this new post, he recounts some of his findings so far.

So I've decided that, over the course of the next couple days (or weeks), I'll dedicate quite a bit of my time to explore ways to improve the way I write web applications. This includes getting into unit/integration testing, automating workflows, and also adopting better coding techniques.

He covers four software packages that he's found so far to help achieve this goal:

• Apache Ant
• SimpleTest for PHP
• Selenium Remote Control
• Selenium IDE

For each of the software in the list, he talks about what kinds of features they offer and how that relates back to his goal. There are also links to downloads and documentation for each of them for further reading.

On the ThinkPHP blog today, there's a new post that looks at using the Selenium Javascript library to test your applications, ensuring that the input methods are all up to snuff.

Testing software whilst ongoing development seems to be a boring job containing a lot of reoccurring tasks. As a reaction on all this effects we need to add more testing. So what do we do? We use a person to click through the application, using its features as he or she thinks they are intended to use.

In the end we need another expert in the team for a boring reoccurring task, finding bugs that are easy to find and most times, simple to resolve. Did i say simple task, reoccurring? Why not use a Software for the click-around testing in our application to check if it still does what it needs to do ?

The testing tool of choice for them is Selenium, a Javascript library to perform the clicks and put into input fields data to check your application's functionality. They describe the three kinds of test suites (links to their descriptions) and show what a simple automated test would look like. There's even a link to a tutorial from IBM on the topic.

They step through the process of creating the test (no code) and show how to store them in CVS (as well as talk about a few "dirty tricks" they found out along the way).