Rob Allen has a new post (a quick introduction) about working with the unit tests in the Zend Framework (version 1), how to get PHPUnit working and execute the tests.

As part of our release process for Zend Framework 1.12, I've been working through the unit tests and running them on PHP 5.2.4 as it seems that recent changes weren't being tested with that version. This isn't totally surprising as Open Source contributors are, almost by definition, interested in new things and so are much more likely to be running PHP 5.4 rather than 5.2!

Since there's a compatibility issue between the tests and the current versions of PHPUnit, he shows you how to install the 3.4 version instead following these instructions. Then, to run the tests, it's a simple call to execute this PHPUnit version with options for outputting to the "standard error", setting an infinite memory limit and pointing to the tests for your component of choice.