Michael Nitchinger has a new post to his blog about a rewrite for the Lithium framework - changing up the li3_fixtures plugin to make it a bit more of what the community needs.

The li3_fixtures plugin was my first Lithium plugin ever, and while it works okay, I feel there is a lot I can do to make it better and more flexible. In this post I want to share my ideas for a new fixture plugin and also want to gather feedback from the community to make it even more awesome.

He gives three instance where fixtures can come in extremely useful - making effective model unit tests with predictable data, mocking models with shortcuts to the data and mocking out web services. Want to add in your own suggestions for his refactor? Comment on the post!

Sebastian Bergmann has two recent posts dealing with some of the more difficult topics in unit testing. One looks at sharing fixtures between tests and the other talks about stubbing and mocking static methods in your tests.

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.

Sebastian Bergmann has announced the release of the latest version of the popular PHP unit testing software - PHPUnit.

Among the features introduced in this new version, the most notable are the support for test dependencies and fixture reuse as well as the possibility to run tests in separate PHP processes for increased test isolation. Please have a look at the ChangeLog for a complete list of changes.

As a teaser, he also mentions the work being done on the code coverage features that will be included in the next release.

On the PHP-Tools blog, Gerd Schauffelberger has posted about a new PEAR package he's just created to implement the FIT testing protocol.

Testing_FIT is the PHP and pearish version of Ward Cunningham's FIT http://fit.c2.com. As such it provides an easy to use framework for acceptance software tests.

The package is a simple download and install and gives you four basic fixtures to use Action-, Column-, Row- and Primitve-Fixture (and a Summary-Fixture for stats purposes).