On the Engine Yard blog today they've posted a conversation about testing between Ed Finkler and Chris Hartjes (also the hosts of the DevHell podcast).

Our friends Ed Finkler and Chris Hartjes recently had a chat about testing in PHP. Read on to get the low down on different testing tools and their relative merits-check it out as Ed and Chris weep for the future, come to some interesting conclusions and get their hands dirty so you don't have to.

They talk some about the current tools for unit testing in PHP applications and show what a sample test looks like. Ed talks about how the current testing tools can make it intimidating for people to get started testing and mentions the built-in testing library in Python that is a bit easier. There's also some mention of acceptance/functional testing and the Behat + Mink combo.

The latest episode of the PHP Town Hall podcast has been released - Episode 5, "PHPness Gate, Sexism and Mental Illness". The usual hosts, Phil Sturgeon and Ben Edmunds, are joined by Ed Finkler and Mike Federmann to talk about recent events in the PHP community.

This was a tricky episode where we talk about some big genuine issues that affect PHP developers around the world, and we talked a lot about a t-shirt. After Chris Hartjes cheated on his /dev/hell podcast by joining us in Episode 3, Chris' partner in crime Ed "Funkatron" Finkler decided to get revenge and come on the show. Our other guest Miko Federmann is a brilliant PHP and C developer who is a friend of Phil and Ben. She joins us on the show to discuss the recent hullabaloo known as "PHPness Gate" and the obviously connected issue of sexism in the industry.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly. If you like the show, consider subscribing to their feed too.

The /Dev/Hell podcast has released their latest episode (hosted by PHP community members Chris Hartjes and Ed Finkler) - Episode 11: "From Gas Station Attendant to Java Developer".

This time out we are blessed by the presence of Fictive Kin brosef of Ed. We explore Jo ël's rags-to-riches story: a young academic schlepping coffee and 44oz soft drinks at a gas station, where he's discovered by a grizzled dev team manager in need of Java skills. From there it's been a whirlwind of web sites, programming languages, and more ops than you can shake a stick at. Actually I was sleepy and wasn't really listening for the first half-hour. I bet it's good though.

You can listen to this latest episode by grabbing the mp3 or by subscribing to their feed (either RSS or iTunes) and get this and other great episodes.

In the latest episode of the "Cloud Out Loud" podcast, Elizabeth Naramore interviews Ed Finkler, most recently known for his MicroPHP Manifesto.

Our own Elizabeth Naramore interviews Ed Finkler, author of the MicroPHP Manifesto.

• The MicroPHP Manifesto
• What was the inspiration for it?
• Let's talk about the controversy around it - where do you think that came from?
• What do you think the impact of the Manifesto has made on the community? Do you think it's given cause to people to rethink their own assumptions?

To listen you can either download the episode (mp3 or ogg) or subscribe to their feed via RSS or iTunes.

The /dev/hell podcast has released their latest episode with special guest Brian Moon (of dealnews).

In our fifth episode we speak to our first ever guest Brian Moon, ancient PHP elder of dealnews and someone who has probably forgotten more about PHP than our two hosts will ever know. [...] In this episode we talk about dealnews, how they use PHP (and how they also use it in some interesting ways), and his thoughts on issues like concurrency and evented systems. We also cover features of PHP that allowed for some major changes and approaches they used in the code base for the site.

Other technologies discussed include Gearman, Node.js, Squid and Varnish. You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

The PHPClasses.org site has posted the latest episode of their "Lately in PHP" podcast - episode 20: "MicroPHP vs Complicated PHP".

Earlier in January Ed Finkler announced the MicroPHP manifesto. It seems to be a rant about against the practices of developers that make PHP development more complicated than it should be. This is one of the main topics discussed by Manuel Lemos and Ernani Joppert in the episode 20 of the Lately in PHP podcast. They also discuss the final release of PHP 5.4.0 and whether you should upgrade it or not, the repercussion of the PHP Hash Collision Vulnerability, as well the trends of PHP world based on the analysis of the PHP Zeitgeist 2011 initiative.

You can listen to this latest episode either by using the in-page player or by downloading the mp3.

The latest episode of the DevHell podcast has been posted - Episode 3, "Beatings Will Continue Until Test Coverage Improves".

Fresh off our holiday break, we're back with our longest show yet. We talk about Chris' new book The Grumpy Programmer's Guide To Building Testable PHP Applications, including his experiences self-publishing with Leanpub. Chris also explains how he fears no precipitation on his excursions to the Codemash conference in Ohio. Then Ed talks about the thought process that lead to his latest shit-stirring blog post "The MicroPHP Manifesto." Ed may or may not begin crying openly. Finally, we discuss when it might be necessary to trash your existing application and rewrite it.

You can listen to this latest episode either via the in-page player or by downloading the mp3 directly.

The Voices of the ElePHPant podcast has posted their latest episode - an interview with Ed Finkler, best known for his work on the Spaz Twitter client.

Cal interviews Ed and asks him his "three questions" about this Open Source project (Spaz):

• At what point did you realize you couldn't do it all yourself and what was the first role you created for someone else?
• What ways do you use to communicate with your developer community and which works the best?
• Other than coding, what's the most fun part about running an Open Source project?

As always, you can either listen to this latest episode in-page, by downloading the mp3 or by subscribing to feed.

Sameer Borate has a recent post to his blog looking at an important part of any application - filtering input from the user and output before its used. In his examples he uses a library called Inspekt (from Ed Finkler) to make the job a lot easier.

Most web security glitches are caused by insufficient input filtering and validation. Despite a large number of validation libraries being available, input sanitization is usually bypassed due to sheer laziness or the idea that your site is somehow immune from bad input data. Inspekt is one such library that has a small footprint and is very easy to integrate into your application.

He goes through the installation (a require_once) and a few examples of how to "cage" incoming data from a sample form with two hidden fields. He shows how to use the library to access the filtered versions of the values and how to run some tests on the data (like checks for alphanumeric, valid hostname, between two values, valid phone number, etc). He also briefly mentions "super cages" that can be used over and over.

The Pique Web podcast has released their latest episode (episode #5) with a continuation from their earlier discussions with Ed Finkler about web platforms and Twitter.

Pique Web is about interesting things on the web. Perhaps even things that Pique our Interest. You see what's happening here. Your regular hosts are Sean Coates and Paul Reinheimer, guests join them with some regularity. This is Part 2 of our interview with Ed Finkler, discussing Web Platforms and Twitter.

You can either use the in-page player to listen to this latest episode or you can download the mp3 directly. For more episodes from the podcast, check out the Pique Web site.