PHP errors are just part of the language. Some internal functions throw warnings or notices and seem unavoidable. A good case is parse_url. The point of parse_url is to take apart a URL and tell me the parts. Until recently, the only way to validate a URL was a regex. You can now use filter_var with the FILTER_VALIDATE_URL filter. But, in the past, I would use parse_url to validate the URL. It worked as the function returns false if the value is not a URL. But, if you give parse_url something that is not a URL, it throws a PHP Warning error message. The result is I would use the evil @ to suppress errors from parse_url. Long story short, you get errors on PHP systems. And you don't need to ignore them.

He talks about the two-step process he's upgraded to to help monitor and handle the errors that pop up - an error handler that logs human-readable and json versions of the errors and something like Circonus to do metric tracking. He also mentions some external services recommended on twitter - HopToad and Loggly.

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.

Duplicate code can be hard to find, especially in a large project. Johann-Peter Hartmann of MAYFLOWER GmbH recently implemented Copy & Paste Detection for PHPUnit's growing set of features that extends its usage scenarios beyond "just unit testing" to a one-stop solution for quality assurance in PHP-based projects.

In his example, Sebastian shows what the response will look like when the tests find duplicate code - giving details like the files involved and the code fragment that was duplicated.

Check out this list in another post on Sebastian's blog for more of the metrics that will be included in the upcoming version.

As of version 3.2, PHPUnit will not only be able to calculate and collect a variety of software metrics. It will also be able to report violations of rules that are based on these metrics in PMD's XML format. This information can then be fed to any tool that integrates with PMD.

The Project Mess Detector (PMD) software scans code and looks for potential problems. Having this integrated with PHPUnit means one less piece of software to run and the potential for even better written code.

The upcoming 3.1.6 release of PHPUnit adds a couple of software metrics to the data that is stored in PHPUnit's test database.

Among the metrics gathered are things like: lines of code, commented lines of code, an attribute inheritance factor, depth of inheritance tree, method hiding factor and a polymorphism factor (he links each of these more complex ones for more information on the subject). Still included in the post is an example of the output for the Cyclomatic Complexity metric.