John Coggeshall has a new post today over on his weblog proving that yes, he is, in fact, not dead - just amazingly busy. One of the things that has been keeping him busy is the Code Coverage support in PHP5.

Code coverage is basically the idea that when I execute an application I want to know exactly which lines of code got executed. When you put that in the context of a test suite, it can tell you exactly how effective your test suite is at testing your code base. That's what I've come up with PHP, all I need is for PHP 5.1 to branch in CVS before I commit my patches.

For those of you who are curious, PHP's test suite covers roughly 48% of the code base -- which I'm told since we've never actually had a number to go with this before is a pretty good start. If you'd like to see a line-by-line analysis of what extensions are best tested, check out this great HTML report of a line-by-line analysis of covered code.

Definitely sounds like a cool tool to have - that and the fact that the HTML output is a nice, clean, easy to read format and you have a killer combination for testing your apps...keep an eye out for more information on this as time goes on...