After asking for topics to blog about on Twitter, Chris Hartjes has posted the first response to the suggestions - a look at continuous integration (CI) in PHP environments.

For those not familiar with the concept of Continuous Integration, I can sum it up with one very glib phrase: it lets you break your code before you buy it. [...] If I were to design a Continuous Integration (hereafter referred to as CI) system, what would it look like?

His requirements include version control integration, easy unit test execution, a web interface and be able to automate it all at a moment's notice. He talks about the importance of unit testing in CI and the tools that are available for the job like phpUnderControl, Xinc and Hudson. He also looks at the build process, from check-in through a successful build result and how he handles bugs when they do pop up.

Raphael Stolt, with some time on his hands, set up a local copy of Xinc, the "shiny new Continuous Integration(CI) server" as hosted on the Google code site and spent some time working with it:

Since then the idea of building a Growl publisher plugin for Xinc was traveling my mind repeatedly, so the following post will break this circle and show a possible approach to build such a plugin, which can be used to notify the build result for continuously integrated projects and thereby provide an on-point/immediate feedback.

He includes the plugin class (ready for cut&paste) as well as the task definition and how to hook it all in to the Xinc build system. There's also a little example of it in action - a happy/sad indicator showing if the build failed or was a success, right there on the desktop.

The Xinc project has released the latest version of their application - 1.0:

The Xinc team are proud to announce the release of Xinc 1.0. Xinc is a free open source continuous integration tool written in PHP 5. It currently supports Subversion and Phing but is extensible to work with any version control or build tool. Xinc is released under an LGPL license.

You can find out more about this library on its new home on Google Code including documentation and two example projects to learn from. You can download this latest version here.

The Xinc project has released the latest version of their application - 1.0:

The Xinc team are proud to announce the release of Xinc 1.0. Xinc is a free open source continuous integration tool written in PHP 5. It currently supports Subversion and Phing but is extensible to work with any version control or build tool. Xinc is released under an LGPL license.

You can find out more about this library on its new home on Google Code including documentation and two example projects to learn from. You can download this latest version here.

The Xinc project has released the latest version of their continuous integration tool (Xinc Is Not CruiseControl) - Release Candidate 1.

Xinc (Xinc Is Not CruiseControl) is a free open source continuous integration tool written in PHP 5. It currently supports Subversion and Phing but is extensible to work with any version control or build tool. Xinc is released under an LGPL license. [...] The release candidate contains an updated basic web reporting component. This can be utilized simply by copying web/index.php to a web accessible location.

Their goal is to have a release of the stable 1.0 version in about three weeks and have frozen the code base in preparation. Most of the work left to be done involves the setup of a PEAR channel (to make installation a snap) and fleshing out the documentation to make things easier for developers just coming in and checking it out.

The Xinc project has released the latest version of their continuous integration tool (Xinc Is Not CruiseControl) - Release Candidate 1.

Xinc (Xinc Is Not CruiseControl) is a free open source continuous integration tool written in PHP 5. It currently supports Subversion and Phing but is extensible to work with any version control or build tool. Xinc is released under an LGPL license. [...] The release candidate contains an updated basic web reporting component. This can be utilized simply by copying web/index.php to a web accessible location.

Their goal is to have a release of the stable 1.0 version in about three weeks and have frozen the code base in preparation. Most of the work left to be done involves the setup of a PEAR channel (to make installation a snap) and fleshing out the documentation to make things easier for developers just coming in and checking it out.

The Xinc (Xinc Is Not CruiseControl) group has released an announcement about reaching the beta mark in the development live of thier tool, Xinc.

Xinc is an open source PHP 5 continuous integration tool designed to integrate with Subversion, Phing and PHPUnit.

There is a growing awareness of continuous integration in the PHP world and we feel that to have to rely on Java to provide this functionality (i.e. CruiseControl) sucks big time. So we are building the PHP 5 alternative.

Their system seems clean and lets you not only set up the push via a running background process but can pull it from Subversion and run any unit tests (via PHPUnit) you might have before pushing the project out.

The Xinc (Xinc Is Not CruiseControl) group has released an announcement about reaching the beta mark in the development live of thier tool, Xinc.

Xinc is an open source PHP 5 continuous integration tool designed to integrate with Subversion, Phing and PHPUnit.

There is a growing awareness of continuous integration in the PHP world and we feel that to have to rely on Java to provide this functionality (i.e. CruiseControl) sucks big time. So we are building the PHP 5 alternative.

Their system seems clean and lets you not only set up the push via a running background process but can pull it from Subversion and run any unit tests (via PHPUnit) you might have before pushing the project out.