Someday I'll look back on this post and think it's super lame, but my recent submission of two tests for PHP's putenv() function made it into PHP_5_3! I've officially made a contribution it's a red letter day, folks. Without Atlanta PHP and PHP's Testfest, none of this would have been possible.

His tests ran with putenv() and the safe_mode_allowed_env_vars/safe_mode_protected_env_vars settings in use. You can see the inclusion in this commit message (by Lars Strojny).

Recently, I wrote some for a project and realized that I wasn't aware of how to generate code coverage reports. Many thanks to the very helpful patrons in the #pear channel on EFNet for helping me to get this working.

He show his setup process (on Kubuntu) - grabbing the PEAR package, installing it and how to get a runner script to integrate the PHPT testing into PHPUnit.

It took us about 2 years to get the last 5% and I believe most of the kudos should go to IBM people, who continue to contribute lots of new tests. I hope that the Testfest will help us to speed up this process.

There are still a lot of items in the red that could use some tests, so if you're looking to help out write up some tests or check your area for a TestFest event to get some help.

Instead of instantiating PHPUnit from phing, I use the command line interface to call PHPUnit. This decouples phing and PHPUnit, which should cause less problems with version updates in the future. To configure PHPUnit, phing creates a temporary XML configuration file which is deleted after PHPUnit has finished.

The source is included in the post - it manually builds the XML file needed for phing to do its job.

So this evening I managed to get PHPT running my tests (they're just basic .phpt tests but run-tests is..well flakey is a nice description some days) for my winapi php extension wrapped inside a "generic test" for Visual Studio. [...] So what did all this accomplish? I now can run my phpt tests through visual studio and collect code coverage on what they're testing. Like GCOV, only for windows.

She's also included a screenshot of what the interface and results of the testing look like in the latest Visual Studio tool.

Today, we will have a look at another great feature of xdebug - creating code coverage statistics. Code coverage statistics show how many times each line of the code has been executed. Conversely, they also show which lines of code have not been executed, which is in fact much more interesting.

He talks a bit about what code coverage is and how it can help you fine tune your application. He walks you through the installation of the two packages that will help out with running the reports - phing and PHPUnit. Using these, he shows how to create a simple unit test and a build file for phing that combine and, via the XDebug calls to xdebug_start_code_coverage, xdebug_stop_code_coverage and xdebug_get_code_coverage, are used to generate the output graphs and stats in a nice, easy to read interface.

I have just released a second release candidate for PHPUnit 3.2, the next major version of the xUnit testing framework for PHP.

According to the Changelog, updates in this new Release Candidate include a number of updates to the software metrics that can be run on code (at project, file, function, class and method level), the addition of DbUnit, code coverage improvements, bug fixes to the TestUI test runner and Selenium integration and much more.

I just released Xdebug 2.0.2. This bugfix release addresses some issues that were introduced with the improved code coverage performance in Xdebug 2.0.1. There are a few other issues left, which will be addressed in a future version.

Fixes include correcting a crash on empty PHP files, a crash when including a file that doesn't exist, an issue with CLI error logging and the direction of the var_dump function call.

This version comes with a few bug fixes but the main thing is greatly improved performance of Xdebug's Code Coverage functionality. To give an idea on what kind of improvement I'm talking, I am including very rough benchmark results.

He describes the benchmarks and gives the results - without code coverage and the pre/post of this new version (2.0.0 versus 2.0.1). The results are very impressive.

Derick recently committed a patch that improves the performance of code coverage data collection in Xdebug. [...] This makes PHPUnit's code coverage functionality so much more practical to use.

Two examples of it in action are included - one for XDebug 2.0.0 and the other for the development version, XDebug 2.0.1-dev.