On the PHP::Impact blog, Federico Cargnelutti has posted about test-driven design, specifically with the Symfony framework.

Symfony is one of the few PHP frameworks that gives you basic tools for starting to write tests. [...] Symfony also provides an extension of this class called sfTestBrowser, designed especially for functional tests, which has all the abilities of the sfBrowser object plus some smart assert methods.

He uses this sfTestBrowser object to run an example test on a same get() call's response. It should match the regular expression of "/This is a temporary page/" but doesn't so it fails. Writing up tests like this for new parts of your application first would be considered test-driven development and the Symfony framework makes that simple.

Raphael Stolt has posted a book review of one of Manning Publishing's PHP-related books, "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP".

Over the last few days I got the chance to skim through the upcoming Manning release "PHP in Action: Modern Software Practices for PHP" by Dagfinn Reiersøl et al. The reviewed book is seperated into four main parts, covering lots of interesting topics in a good and fluent writing style.

Raphael outlines the book, mentioning the four parts the book is divided up into:

• Basic PHP tools and concepts
• Developing applications via Test Driven Development
• Web presentation and user interfaces
• Object-oriented development including things like database abstraction

Raphael gives the book a positive rating and recommends it for anyone that has the basics down and is looking to extend their knowledge that much more.