A common way to automate development and deployment tasks is by writing shell scripts, however, Phing provides some advantages over shell scripts for task automation. [...] But, having a large collection of shell scripts can lead to a maintenance nightmare, reason why I decided to port some of them to PHP as Phing tasks. I chose Phing because it's simple, powerful and very easy to extend.

He talks about DbDeployTask (an optional task for database revisions) and how to use the system for Agile development practices.

While being an easy read, this is a well written, serious book and is aimed squarely at enterprise-level developers and software engineers who make their living through the development and architecture of solutions developed in PHP.

He breaks down the book into the three sections its title mentions - working with objects, design patterns and a healthy dose of PEAR, phpDocumentor, PHPUnit, CVS and phing.

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.

Xinc is an open source PHP 5 continuous integration tool designed to integrate with Subversion, Phing and PHPUnit.

There is a growing awareness of continuous integration in the PHP world and we feel that to have to rely on Java to provide this functionality (i.e. CruiseControl) sucks big time. So we are building the PHP 5 alternative.

Their system seems clean and lets you not only set up the push via a running background process but can pull it from Subversion and run any unit tests (via PHPUnit) you might have before pushing the project out.