Christopher Jones shows us today how to set up and run tests (using the built-in extension testing PHP has) to test the OCI8 functionality that that extension provides.

The test suite can't test everything. You should test your applications with your new PHP too. This gives load and real-life testing not possible with PHP's script based test suite.

[...] The tests in ext/oci8/tests verify the behavior of the OCI8 extension. To run them follow these steps.

There's four steps he gives that will help you check your Oracle compile installation including what the response of the test results will look like.

Cal Evans over on the Zend Developer Zone has another of his infamous (well, okay - not infamous, but definitely good) interviews with people all around the PHP community. This time, it's a chat with Ed Finkler, a developer over at CERIAS concerning the new security tool designed to help even the security-clueless to protect themselves and their system.

Intrigued as much by this project, as I was by the fact that Ed wrote me and told me it was time for me to interview him, I called Ed and we talked about the project.

They talk about where the idea for the tool came from, one of the targets for the use of the project (those on shared hosting), and the mention that it is modular in design and they are more than happy to have developers work up tests to be sure things are working 100% correctly.

In a new post to her blog today, Ligaya Turmelle mentions a conversation she was having with some of the PHP documentation team about their transitions and the possibilities for integrating something new into the system - creating phpt tests automatically.

Seems Philip and colder were talking on the IRC about possibly using the php doc examples to automatically generate some phpt tests to make sure the examples in the docs worked correctly. I personally think it is a great idea for another reason - it would give the QA team a base listing of phpt tests for the various PHP functions. With that base listing it would be easier to modify/add to the various phpt tests to cover the boundries of the function.

A script to implement this feature is already in the works - a preview of it can even be found here.

A PDF of our slides is now available: Power PHP Testing (PDF).

Geoff also has some tarballs available that let you test a very simple PHP library (functions.inc) with Apache-Test, Simple-Test, PHPUnit, and phpt: http://people.apache.org/~geoff/power-php-testing

He also gives some other resources for finding out more about Apache/PHP testing as well as a brief mention of TAP (Test Anything Protocol)...