On SitePoint.com today there's a new article in their unit testing series posted today - a look at annotations and mocking in advanced unit testing with PHPUnit. (Disclaimer: I am the author of this article series.)

PHPUnit has lots of advanced features that can be amazingly helpful when that special case comes around. This includes extending the framework itself, making test suites, building static datasets, and the focus of this article: annotations and mocking. Don't worry if you're unsure what either of these are; I'm here to help. I trust by the end that you'll see how these two features can be useful to both you and your tests.

The article starts with annotations showing how they can be used both on the class side to help with test generation and on the test side to help in evaluation (like expectedException). In the mocking section, it shows you how create simple and complex mock objects to replace a sample database query.

In a new post to his blog Devis Lucato points out something he noticed when working with objects and anonymous functions/closures - they're not all as they seem.

Both solutions allow to instantiate an anonymous object with properties. They are used as value objects and have no other purpose than storing values, so no logic can be included and they don't come with methods. They can be used as function parameters instead of arrays, for instance. PHP 5.3.0 introduced anonymous functions and closures, so it is now possible to attach functions to these VOs (*). [...] The first thing to notice is that these properties are not methods but callable functions:

In his example, an anonymous function dynamically appended to an object doesn't have access to a property set on the object just one line before. There's a way around it with call_user_func, but it's not practical. His proposed solution is to create a type of Anonymous class that uses the __call method to catch the methods and translate them into calls to call_user_func_array automatically.