Maybe it took the PHP community a little longer to realize the importance of testing. But now that we know how to build applications that "just work", are fast and scalable, as well as secure, a big topic in the PHP community right now is to implement processes and use techniques that help us assure that the software works correctly throughout the its lifecycle.

He points to some comments made at a recent panel discussion about PHP and testing, the proliferation of frameworks for the language and the things that have no name that developers use every day to make their code "just work".

So today you get a double bonus. You get to check out Pro PHP, Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and more by Kevin McArthur. You also get a great tutorial on SPL!

The sample chapter looks (obviously) at the SPL, the Standard PHP Library - functions included with PHP5 releases to accomplish some pretty cool things.

Dmitry posted results of performance test comparing PHP 5.2 and 5.3 to internals which are impressive numbers.

The improvements were measured based on several popular pieces of software like Drupal, typo3 and WordPress. The overall performance gian was around thirty percent across the board.

I spent quite a lot of time comparing the different behaviours of the various drivers in the hope I could find out how PDO drivers are supposed to work. The PDO documentation and the specification do not cover each and every detail. PDO really needs some love...

He picks out the FETCH_UNIQUE constant as one that needs a little work and tries to track down exactly what it's doing. One issue he found was that it requires combination with other flags to make the unique part of it work correctly (like FETCH_OBJ or FETCH_COLUMN). He works through several examples, both ones that apply the unique call and others that don't, comparing the results.

I just started listing the techniques I've learned when writing tests to exercise the web interface of a PHP application. This is from my experience and my personal preferences; it's not the final word or necessarily right for everyone.

He suggests:

• Use SimpleTest's Web tester if you can
• Test the web output using regular expressions
• Use element IDs or names to test links, forms and fields
• Log HTTP requests in the application

The ideal was to move away from line-by-line setup and manipulation of Zend instances towards a more simplified model which is standardised for any PHPSpec specs.

He's already created an "experimental branch" to work inside of and some of these updates have been made to the trunk for the release of PHPSpec 0.3.0. The key that he found was in getting the customization of the "Zend Context operational to set up elements of the FrontController". He also includes a simple example of the extended functionality in action - simple interface methods to work with Twitter.