Miro has submitted some information about the latest meeting of the Zagreb PHP User Group happening December 13th at 6pm in the Multimedia Institute:

Although Zagreb PHP Meetup started only 3 months ago with monthly meetups (up to 30 developers coming), our next meeting will be first meetup with organized talks. December meetup will have 5 talks with themes like 'How to write readable code?', 'Flex & PHP development' , 'Introduction to test driven development' && 'MySQL - explain explained'.

We would like to invite all interested PHP and non-PHP developers that would like to listen to some of best Croatian PHP devs (and understand Croatian language) to come on December 13th from 6PM to Mama, Preradoviceva 18 in Zagreb. Unfortunately we are limited with number of available seats so please signup at http://zgphp.eventbrite.com/.

Due to space limitations, there's only 12 seats available so hurry and reserve your spot if you'd like to attend (it's free)!

Have a user group meeting you'd like announced? Let us know!

On the Xebee blog there's a recent post looking at test-driven development with the Zend Framework and PHPUnit. They show how they work well together and make it simpler to use TTD to create and test your applications.

Over the past few days I was going through the Zend Framework reference docs and I found myself pleasantly surprised with all that the latest version of this web application framework provides. [...] Out of the many new features, what stood out for me was the ease with which Zend Framework and PHPUnit complement and work with each other.

He talks about some of the features of PHPUnit (including dependencies, testing for exceptions and errors) and how it fits into a good deployment strategy. He shows how you can use the Zend_Test component of the framework, along with the Zend_Test_PHPUnit features, to make a sample test case. There's also an example of using the Zend_Test_PHPUnit_Db component to test database information and your backend data stores to compare them to a formatted XML document.

Giorgio Sironi has a new post talking about his upcoming eBook for all of those interesting in testing PHP applications - "Practical PHP Testing (Don't Let Your PHP be Eaten Alive)".

This publication focuses on testing and designing php code, with the aid of the leading tool for test automation, PHPUnit. Testing is a skill which is often neglected by php developers, but testable code inherit many benefits of the good design rules it is forced to observe.

The book will include the content of his testing series of posts, code examples, a glossary of commonly used terms and several Test-Driven Development exercises in each chapter. He looking to have it published during the beginning of December and will be released under a Creative Commons license. Here's a sneak peek at the cover.

On the Avnet Labs blog today Ekerete has posted a look at test-driven design with Zend Framework applications (controllers) and PHPUnit. This is the second part of a series of articles on the topic (here's part one).

In the first part of this series we set up our Zend Framework application and specified our requirements. In this part we'll tackle the first requirement '" as a user, I want to visit the home page and see a form where I can enter my full name and email address.

The tutorial shows how to write tests to check the based index controller and how to check the email newsletter enrollment page for the correct form fields. Code snippets for the tests and the controller/forms are also included.

On the Avnet Labs blog today Ekerete has kicked off a new series looking specifically at using test-driven design to create Zend Framework-based applications:

However, as useful as the series [from Jani Hartikainen on TTD] is, it doesn't provide answers to Zend Framework specific testing issues (and considering all the ZF-specific posts on his site, that's quite surprising). [...] In the coming weeks, I'll put together a how-to on testing ZF applications using a Test Driven Development (TDD) approach. With TDD tests are written first and as such the test suite guides the design of the production code.

He shows how to set up a sample application, the Jira Base, and how to set up a simple base-level test.