Benjamin Eberlei introduced me to Phake with his recent article: it is a Composer-ready PHP library that integrates easily with PHPUnit and provides an independent Test Doubles framework, capable of producing Stubs, Mocks, and Spies. The syntax and object model reminds me of Mockito, the Java Test Double framework from the authors of Growing Object-Oriented Software. I like tools that do one thing and do it well, and after experimenting with Phake I'm using it on all new code.

He compares the two tools on a few different pieces of functionality including creating stubs, mocks and spies. Sample code is included for both sides. It's not a detailed guide by any means, but it can give you a better picture of how the two compare.

Building on the foundation from the previous screencast, he shows how to enhance it and allow it to autoload based on an autoloader defined in a "stub.php" file.

You can grab the complete source for this screencast over on github.

A mock object can be used anywhere in the program where the program expects an object of the mocked class. However, this only works as long as the object can be passed into the context where the original object is used.

Ideally this wouldn't be a problem - handled correctly, dependency injection would make it a non-issue. But, because it has been known to happen, PHPUnit gives you the ability, via the set_new_overload method, to capture that object definition and mock it with a reference to another method in the test class.

From the first of the two tutorials:

A good example of a fixture that makes sense to share across several tests is a database connection: you log into the database once and reuse the database connection instead of creating a new connection for each test. This makes your tests run faster.

This fixture sharing example uses the setUpBeforeClass and tearDownAfterClass methods to create and destroy the connection.

In the second article Sebastian shows how to mock up a sample static function and mock it with the "staticExpects" helper.

It's not tailored specifically to any one testing framework, rather it's an entirely separate framework with a discrete API. The idea is that you can use this framework within PHPUnit, or SimpleTest, or anything else really, without being forced to rely on the built-in support (if any) that test framework provides. Mockery was designed specifically to implement a form of Domain Specific Language (DSL). It makes extensive use of a fluent interface mixed with methods to approximate plain English.

He includes an overview of what Mock Objects and Stubs are and how to set them up with the Mockery tool. He finishes things off with a look at the Mockery and Mock Object Expectation APIs. You can grab this first release either as a PEAR package or from its github page.

These IDEs are able to provide code completion not only for prebuilt extension code, but also for user-level PHP code. This gives us a way to provide it to PHP-GTK developers : all it takes is a "stub" file containing PHP declarations equivalent to the PHP-GTK2 classes, interfaces, and their methods and constants.

Making it by hand would be slow (and not efficient at all) so they opted to let the Reflection API do the heavy lifting for them and generate a Gtk_Dumper output file to hand to your editor and let it parse. The file is available for download.

The word is that SimpleTest is moving towards PHP5 in the near future which is great news for all Mockists in PHP. When I moved to PHP, SimpleTest became the main ingredient in many a coding session up to 2 in the morning but once PHP5 gained traction and I was seduced into leaving PHP4 behind I found myself relying more heavily on PHPUnit. Not that SimpleTest is anti-PHP5 in any way (only some small things and obviously E_STRICT giving it a heart attack), but more projects I didn't control leaned heavily towards PHPUnit once PHP5 took off.

He goes on to talk about some of the differences between the two pieces of software (including Mock Object support and Stubs) and his personal feelings on how each of them works in his development experience. His interest has leaned more towards needing the Mock objects, though, so he favors SimpleTest for doing just what he needs.