Mike Naberezny has posted about some improvements that were made to the PHPUnit testing software lately (support for TestNG-style groupings) and how, with a few of his own suggestions it was made a bit more flexible.

At my company, we typically organize our test case classes into high-level groups such as unit and functional. Method-level group annotations are inconvenient for us because we'd need to annotate every method of every test case class.

He includes an example of their use - commenting a testing class and running it through the phpunit command line tool with a call to the testing group's name.

In this new post, Justin Silverton shares a few helpful hints for creating high performance applications in PHP:

• use multi resultset queries to your database rather than many small ones
• page/object caching
• gzip compression
• tune your web server
• Don't save performance testing for the end of the project

Each of the items has explanation and links to more details on them (including links to three difference object caching applications - ion cube, alternative PHP cache, turck MMCache).

On his blog today, Justin Silverton has posted this brief new tutorial covering the use of PEAR's cache_lite package.

Cache_lite is a php/pear caching module that is designed for high traffic sites. It is different than most caching systems because it has a built-in locking mechanism that will prevent cache corruption that can sometimes occur when there are a large amount of concurrent users trying to read and write to your cached data.

He wastes no time getting to the examples, showing first a very basic example of chacing/looking for a cache of your data. There's no installation HOWTO, but if you're familiar with the PEAR system, installation should be a simple matter.