Mike Lively has a new post about a PEAR channel he's set up for his Phake mocking tool on his digitalsandwich.com domain.

For those that may not have caught my first post on the subject, Phake is a mock framework that I announced a couple of days ago in Introducing Phake Mocking Framework. It was recommended in the comments that I get it on a pear channel somewhere, which is something I have wanted to do but hadn't had a reason to do until this week. Well, now there is an official Digital Sandwich Pear Channel that is hosting Phake.

Discover the channel with the PEAR installer and run the install with the path provided. He notes that the release is alpha because of the lack of documentation but, despite this, the API is stable. Also, you'll need to be using PHP 5.2+ to use the tool.

Mike Lively has a new post to his blog today looking at a mocking framework he's developed to work hand in hand with PHPUnit to make mocking easier and more robust.

I have used PHPUnit heavily now for the last 4 years. As anyone that is heavily involved in writing Unit Tests knows, test doubles (commonly referred to as mock objects) are a necessary part of your toolbox. The mocking options that we used to have for PHP unit testing have traditionally been fairly limited and most all of them in some form or another were ports of JMock. The way PHP operates as well as some decisions made to more closely emulate how JMock does things lead to functionality in the existing mock library for PHPUnit that for some are a hassle.

To help eliminate this hassle, he create the Phake mocking framework - a tool that comes at mocking a different way than the normal PHPUnit procedures. He includes some sample code for a class to test, a simple stub for getting a value and how to use it in a basic test. By calling a "Phake::mock()" on the class to make an object, you can call the method and run a "verify()" to ensure that the results are correct. He talks about some other options that the mocking allows too like calling a "no interaction" method on a mock and argument capturing.

Pavel Shevaev has put together what he calls "yet another Ant alternative" - a tool written in PHP to create project related tasks in a style that matches the Ant and rake methods.

There is a lib-taskman project on the google code hosting where you can find the full documentation, sources and latest releases. It's probably not that elegant as rake but if you want to stick to PHP and have Ant-alike functionality without any XML programming then taskman may turn out to be handy. taskman is very simple to use, it requires only one include, all its code resides in one PHP file, and it has no external dependencies.

He includes a basic use example that sets up the build with "task_hello", "task_comma", "task_world" and "task_say" methods that each do some basic output to show the flow of the process. He also gives examples of possible uses for the tasks like database bootstrapping, auto-code generation, project deployment, etc. He also mentions two other PHP-based projects that do similar things - pake and Phake.