PHPDeveloper.org http://www.phpdeveloper.org Up-to-the Minute PHP News, views and community en-us Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:14:40 -0500 30 <![CDATA[Zend Developer Zone: Designing Klingon Warships Using Behaviour Driven Development]]> http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9608 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/9608 The Zend Developer Zone has another new tutorial from Padraic Brady talking about testing your applications (i.e. unit tests). In this new article, he expands on his previous one and dives a bit deeper into the behaviour-driven development process.

In this article, I introduce a TDD related practice called Behaviour-Driven Development which has been gathering attention for over a year and gaining converts (like me!).

He briefly covers what BDD is and how it can be used to solidify code against issues that might come up down the road (and how it compares to test-driven development). Some sample code/tests are included to give you a better idea of how it all fits together - a set of scenarios for any given "story". True to the title, Padraic writes his tests around the construction of a Klingon Bird of Prey ship.

]]> Mon, 11 Feb 2008 15:34:00 -0600 <![CDATA[O'Reilly: Designing a database-driven PHP App? Don't Forget the Data!!]]> http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5274 http://www.phpdeveloper.org/news/5274 On the O'Reilly Network's PHP blog today, there's a new post bk jones that looks at the other side of application design, from the data's perspective.

If you have a sourceforge account, and are on your way to becoming the best thing to happen to the web since Yahoo or Google, then I beg of you to put a call out for people who understand database design fundamentals.

Here's the story: If you're a PHP developer, I don't really want you to learn how to design a database. No, really. I don't. I want you to write PHP. There are few people who do both things extremely well, because both take a good bit of time. If you're a PHP developer, I want you to write code that'll make my head spin. However, the path to greatness is to be conscious of your own ignorance - so just acknowledge that you've never done or studied database design, and go find someone who has!

He mentions three misconceptions to consider and avoid when developing a PHP application:

  • The interface determines database design
  • "I only need a small, simple database"
  • "More tables makes for harder coding"

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