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 They're a bit out of date and some parts might be inaccurate, but they're still a good start.

PHP.net has posted a wrapup of this year's TestFest and the great progress that was made to bring the language development up to the next level.

Overall 158 tests have been submitted as part of TestFest 2008 since the launch of the TestFest submission site by 30 different people from people all over the world. Actually this is not counting the various submissions by existing core developers, who also took this opportunity to add some more tests. This has actually increased total test coverage by about 10%.

It also mentions Felix De Vliegher who, because of his large volume of tests (and quality of them), was granted commit rights into the PHP repository to add his in himself. The list of elePHPant winners is included as well. You can also still submit tests through the TestFest submission site (just not for any of the rewards).

On the Debuggable blog today Tim Koschutzki looks at another testing topics for the CakePHP framework - a cleaner way for testing models.

Up until now there was always a need to create a so-called test model that extends your model-under-test in order to overwrite its $useDbConfig setting to be 'test_suite'. By that you ensured that your models run with the test_suite datasource when the tests are run. [...] Nate proposed ClassRegistry::config(), which allows you to tell the ClassRegistry class which datasource it shall use when ClassRegistry::init() is used the next time (and thereby a model is instantiated).

He includes an example of the new functionality - a test case ensuring that three articles are there and are marked as published. The registry makes it easier to automatically create the ArticleTest instance inside the test case rather than having to manually declare and define it.

As was previously mentioned by Christopher Jones, the PHP 5.3 branch is now under a feature freeze. Lukas Smith has posted a few more details about the upcoming release.

Last thursday was the begin of the feature freeze phase. Well its not really a hard feature freeze in the sense that we still have plans for a few new features and tweaks, but it means the end of the "maintainers freedom" that usually rules PHP development more or less.

New features will have to go through either him or Johannes to be included and they are doing their best to get the alpha 1 release of this new version out by July 31st.

Lukas is also trying a more unconventional approach to bug fixes to try to get the major ones knocked out first - posting them as a comment to this blog post. So far, no comments on bugs have been added, but there are a good number to get through. To help narrow it down he's also put out a plea to developers out there to help validate current bugs to potentially knock off a few of the ones that can be marked bogus.

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.

Akash Mehta has posted a look at unit testing for PHP applications with the SimpleTest tool in a new post to the Developer Tutorials blog.

We recently looked at front-end testing of web applications with Selenium. Today, we'll take another approach to testing your PHP applications: backend unit testing for your actual PHP code. As part of our posts on test driven development, here's a quick intro to using SimpleTest to test your PHP applications.

He introduces the SimpleTest software and shows what a sample test might look like for a simple math question (testing to see if the result of the addition is correct). He also points out a good tutorial on the SimpleTest website to help you get started.

In a recent blog entry Mike Borozdin takes a look at a version of a data query language implemented in PHP, LINQ, as PHPLinq.

I read about the PHP Implementation of LINQ called PHPLinq. Frankly, I was skeptical about it. Finally, I gave it a try. I still remain skeptical...Let me explain why

He includes an example of a query on an array and how it's "less correct" than a more true to form LINQ implementation. Despite reservations though, he still feels that this implementation of LINQ for PHP has some "cool features" in its own right and it worth checking out.

Lukas Smith has just become the co-release manager for the much anticipated next stable release in the PHP 5.x series - PHP 5.3.

Its quite an honor and a challenge. [...] We hope together we have enough brain cycles to push put what is probably the biggest minor release in the history of PHP. Just take a look at the todo list and the scratchpad detailing all the additions.

He also asks for any help they can get to help identify all of the changes for the new release and to do the usual testing against the current CVS version with applications to see if there's any breakage. The more you test now, the less that has to be fixed post-release - so get out there and get testing!

Damien Seguy has submitted the latest PHP usage statistics for the results of April 2008.

Highlights in this month's edition include:

• PHP 5.2.6 is growing up fast, thanks to no PHP 5.3
• PHP 5 reaches 38.93% of PHP market share, up 2%
• They passed the mark of 30 millions domain tested this month

You can get the full stats (including the numbers and some great graphs) from the Nexen.net website - full stats, evolution stats.