ExpressionEngine Pro Anna Brown and Testing Hero Chris Hartjes join Ben Edmunds and Phil Sturgeon to discuss the recent rumblings in the ExpressionEngine community and the new EE StackExchange site. We talk about Inversion of Control (IoC), what it is, why its useful and how it's done. We also talk a little bit about how PHP has been (and is continuing) to move towards a post-framework world thanks to independant framework-agnostic components - and of course we talk with Chris about unit-testing.

You can listen to this latest episode either through the in-page player or by downloading it directly. You can also catch up on the two previous epsidoes covering PHP 5.5 and Composer/Laravel 4.

Questions from Jeffery Way include:

• You recently self-published "The Grumpy Programmer's Guide to Building Testable Applications." What made you want to write this specific title?
• In your opinion, what is the single biggest advantage to testing your applications?
• Testing applications is a bit odd, in that, overall, the idea is a simple one. [...] Was there a specific article or video that suddenly made you "get" it all those years ago?
• What are your thoughts on the vitriol toward PHP lately - referring to various viral blog posts on the subject? Is it warranted?

You can find out more about Chris' book here or follow him on Twitter or his blog.

This time out we are blessed by the presence of Fictive Kin brosef of Ed. We explore Jo ël's rags-to-riches story: a young academic schlepping coffee and 44oz soft drinks at a gas station, where he's discovered by a grizzled dev team manager in need of Java skills. From there it's been a whirlwind of web sites, programming languages, and more ops than you can shake a stick at. Actually I was sleepy and wasn't really listening for the first half-hour. I bet it's good though.

You can listen to this latest episode by grabbing the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed (either RSS or iTunes) and get this and other great episodes.

When most developers think about books on testing, they think about books that highlight things like "test driven development" or "how to build a test for X." [...] This is not true of Chris Hartjes' book, "The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications". When I asked Chris if I could review his book, I expected a step-by-step guide to writing tests. What I got was a step-by-step guide to building an application that COULD be tested. There's a big difference, and it's important to understand the distinction.

He points out that the book provides more about good application structure than who to write the tests for it. It provides a guide to creating modular applications that can be easily pulled apart and tested as well as some practical examples. He also includes a few "wise words" quoted from the book including: "if it's not yours, wrap it up" and "testing is good; testable applications are better."

You can pick up your own copy of the book fron its page on the Leanpub site.

Cal's "three questions" for Chris revolve (mostly) around his testing emphasis:

• Which unit testing framework do you recommend and why do you choose it over other options?
• What is "enough" when it comes to testing your applications?
• What's the biggest challenge you've faced in organizing a user group and how did you handle it?

You can listen to this latest episode either via downloading the mp3 directly.

In this edition I talked with Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer), the co-organizer of the GTA PHP User Group (@gtaphp). Chris is a real Grumpy PHP Programmer! But grumpy in a very positive sense though. He focuses his effort in applying and transcending his best practice ideals with the codes he write. I would tag him as the "perfectionist programmer"; he will not hesitate to scrap his piece of work if he finds a fault or a room for improvement and start all over again with that "eye for perfection". In this interview, he will talk a bit about those coding best practices fortunately.

Chris answers questions about:

• His history with PHP
• His favorite PHP book
• What tools he uses (IDE)
• His description of the PHP community
• His favorite conference

You can read the answers to these and more in the full interview.

In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon, ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. [...] In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some major changes and approaches they used in the code base for the site.

Other technologies discussed include Gearman, Node.js, Squid and Varnish. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

Fresh off our holiday break, we're back with our longest show yet. We talk about Chris' new book The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications, including his experiences self-publishing with Leanpub. Chris also explains how he fears no precipitation on his excursions to the Codemash conference in Ohio. Then Ed talks about the thought process that lead to his latest shit-stirring blog post "The MicroPHP Manifesto." Ed may or may not begin crying openly. Finally, we discuss when it might be necessary to trash your existing application and rewrite it.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

Cal's "three questions" for Chris center around some of his experience with frameworks:

• Are frameworks a good thing or a bad thing for PHP developers?
• If you could talk to the heads of all of the major frameworks, what would you tell them?
• What advice do you have for those new to PHP when selecting a framework?

You can listen either through the in-page player, by downloading the mp3 or you can subscribe to their feed and get the latest right in your feed reader.

Shortly after Chris Hartjes released his new book Refactoring Legacy Applications Using CakePHP he contacted me and asked if I'd be willing to review it. I jumped at the chance and Chris emailed me the DRM free PDF. After posting it to The PirateBay, I settled in and gave it a read.

Overall, Matt found the content of the book good but had a few things he might change - the "too smooth" nature of the update to CakePHP and the inclusion of a "partial refactoring" section (one that talked about only updating part of an application to the framework and integrating it with the rest of the site).