In many of our projects, utilities and vendor classes are implemented with a singleton pattern. [...] In this post, we'll cover a nice way to inject a PHPUnit mock object for use in testing methods that utilize singleton classes.

He starts by introducing mocking and how to use mock classes in PHPUnit with a simple "sayHello" example. Adding on another layer, he creates a "SomeclassMock" class, defining its own "expects" and "cleanup" methods. This class forces the Singleton method to act more like a regular non-static method and "resets" it after each use.

A big focus of 2.0 it seems is going to be performance and cleaning up the structure to make use of php 5.3 features which is great, I have been preaching the need for ZF to start taking performance as a real concern for a while now. On the other hand they have gotten to a certain point that they need to reflect on what they already have and not let the spiderwebs grow to large.

Richard points out that the Zend Framework, which has a focus on being a "business-class framework" and having the best to offer, has quite a few parts of it that are older and aren't well maintained. This sort of thing could cause some big problems down the line and could even cause some doubt over the developer's choice of frameworks.

Yahoo is Helping Zend with PHP 6, says Andi Gutmans co-founder and vice president of technology at Israeli-based company Zend Technologies, in an interview with Stephen Shankland of c|net news. PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

They mention what PHP6 will be and include a link to the (oldish) meeting notes concerning it. Be sure to check out the comments for some interesting questions...