unit tests

Sublime Text 2 is a new cross-platform text editor that I’ve recently switched to.

It’s still in public beta, but already offers better performance (and battery life!) and a better look (fonts that render properly!) than Java-based IDEs such as Netbeans.

One thing it didn’t have was support for PHPUnit, so I’ve made a plugin.

It’s available to install via Package Control.

On the Codeception blog there's an introduction to the Codeception tool, a behavior-driven framework written in PHP (in the spirit of Behat).

Jakub Zalas has a recent post to his blog with a hint about how to test Symfony container services by mocking them (when testing with Behat) with the help of Mockery (and the PSSMockeryBundle).

Some watchful readers pointed out some subtle but nonetheless important bugs in the framework we have built yesterday.

When creating a framework, you must be sure that it behaves as advertised. If not, all the applications based on it will exhibit the same bugs.

The good news is that whenever you fix a bug, you are fixing a bunch of applications too.

In a new post to his blog Marco Tabini offers some suggestions on unit testing - not really a tutorial on how to it, more of an "easy way in" to introducing it to your development process.

Unit testing shouldn’t be hard. In fact, given its usefulness, it should be easy and pleasant—a tool that every developer would never want to do without.

And yet, I see programmers (and, more frighteningly, systems architects) struggling with it constantly.

In many cases, they are saddled with large codebases that have never seen any tests whatsoever on one hand, and the fact that a recent changes has caused their entire system to crap out on the other.

In a recent post from the AppBackr blog they share a solution they've found for running unit tests automatically for lazy coders using a combination of PHPUnit, Watchr and Growl notifications (OS X-only, obviously).

In this quick post today Robert Basic shares a hint for using Xdebug together with Zend Framework unit tests to get effective results.

Till Klampaeckel has a new post to his blog today looking at the method he's found (through some help from others) to be able to mock out protected methods in his unit tests.

With all of the frameworks making their way around the PHP community, it's interesting to see different developers' takes on judging which is the best for their needs.

In this new post to his blog Volker Dusch takes the opposite stance - he hates talking about frameworks.