On the PHP::Impact blog there's a recent post looking at using the popular unit testing PHP framework PHPUnit to test Zend Framework controllers.

Testing a Web application is a complex task, because a Web application is made of several layers of logic. Unit testing a Zend Framework controller can be very difficult, specially for those who are not familiar with the Zend Framework. You can test your action controllers using Zend_Test and/or PHPUnit. Zend_Test allows you to simulate requests, insert test data, inspect your application's output and generally verify your code is doing what it should be doing.

He opts for the second one and includes the directory structure you'll need to set up the tests, an example bootstrap file and a simple controller (AllTests). A simple test example is also included that checks a few things - if its the default action, the first action, parameter names and method names.

In a new post to his blog today Johannes Schluter talks about a plugin for the NetBeans IDE that allows you to run tests for PHP's regression test suite right in the editor.

The test system therefore produces a bunch of files, a file containing the expected output, one containing the actual output and a diff between these as relevant files. The problem there is that the diff, for being portable, is using a quite simple mechanism which only shows the lines which differ without any context.

[...] Lately I've changed my way of working and use vim less, I still use it, but I use NetBeans as an IDE more and more. So I thought a bit about that test issue and searched my brain for my Java skills and started playing around to see whether I manage to write a NetBeans plugin which can run the tests and report the results in a usable way.

Hes created a project for the plugin (where you can download the latest version - 0.6.0) and install it to your local IDE copy. It adds a toolbar icon, asks for the location of the binaries to test and runs the diff quickly and easily. You can see a screenshot of the tool in action here.

In a new post to his blog Eli White looks at something that can be a difficult task at times - interview programmers to find the right fit for your job. HE has one suggestion that could help a good developer stand out from the rest.

I've interviewed my fair share of programmers over the years, and I find personally that how you interview a 'junior' versus 'intermediate' versus a 'senior' programmer needs to change. Specifically in regards to one topic. What's that topic? It's giving a coding test (as well as just whether you ask coding questions in the interview)

He suggests that its especially good for weeding out those for a "junior developer" role showing where they put their emphasis. For a senior role, however, he suggests a test of a different sort - ranking their experience, their history and how much they've publicly done in the community (talks/articles/etc).

Sebastian Bergmann as a new post talking about a few of the features of the PHPUnit unit testing framework, especially test isolation.

Some of PHPUnit features come with the cost of a performance penality. This posting explores the effect of the --no-syntax-check, $backupGlobals = FALSE;, and --coverage-html options.

He compares benchmarks for a test with few different settings - $GLOBALS, syntax check and code coverage (including graphical output of the execution times on the various parts of the tests).

In looking to test his fputscsv functionality, David Otton found a simple way to measure its performance by using streams.

Then I realised I could use PHP's (fairly) new IO streams to dump the function's output to a temporary buffer, and read it back in for comparison. Not perfect, but it removes concerns about file mutexes, permissions, unique filenames, etc. and speeds up the tests, as they never touch disc.

He uses a custom stream and points it to php://memory to store and read the data from. Code is included in the post as well as example usage. It runs an assert that the value pushed into another memory chunk is the same as the first one (ensuring that the results of his fputcsv calls are valid).

Sebastian Bergmann talks about a new bit of functionality he's put into the 3.4 release of PHPUnit (the popular unit testing tool for PHP) based on a suggestion from a paper he'd read:

Back in July, I came across an academic paper (more academic papers on testing that I read recently) titled "JExample: Exploiting Dependencies Between Tests to Improve Defect Localization". [...] For the upcoming PHPUnit 3.4 I have implemented support for the idea expressed in the paper mentioned above.

The feature is a system that helps localize problems at the source, stripping away all of the cascading issues it might have tripped off, causing other tests to fail. This new feature (as illustrated by his code example using a DependencyFailureTest class) makes it simple to fail a test immediately whenever the scripts needs to via a fail() method. Check out the full post for the rest of the code and some further explanation on how it works.

Pierre-Alain Joye has pointed out that the latest release candidate of the PHP 5.2.x series (5.2.7RC3) has been posted for download.

PHP 5.2.7RC3 has been released. It is likely to be the last RC and the final release is planed for Thursday next week. Please test it and report any issue you may found. The sources can be fetched here and the binaries in the windows site.

He also mentions a milestone for the PHP project - releasing the Windows builds at the same time as the normal source builds. Check out on the php.internals list for more information.

In a new post to his blog Matthew Weier O'Phinney talks about using the Zend_Test component of the Zend Framework to set up test suites on your application.

Testing and test automation should be easy and the complex approach is overkill for most of our applications. Fortunately, PHPUnit offers some other methods that make doing so relatively simple. The easiest method is to use an XML configuration file.

He includes a basic XML config file for a "My Test Suite" setup defining the application's directory and where to log the end report to. This simple PHPUnit configuration can be used with the "phpunit" command line binary to auto-configure all you'll need for the testing. Matthew also includes the code for a sample TestHelper you can drop right into the app to help set up your environment correctly when testing is needed.

In a recent blog post Zoe Slattery took a look at opcodes in PHP, specifically related to performance increases.

After one particularly frustrating day [looking at how the Zend engine works] I asked a colleague (Andy Wharmby) about the issue I was looking at. Then a miracle happened - he'd not only looked at it but had documented it (and many other things) in a set of charts.

She has linked to the charts (Open Office format) for the results of some tests her friend had already run. They're a bit out of date and some parts might be inaccurate, but they're still a good start.