Continuing on from his preamble on the integration of the PHPSpec BDD tool into the Zend Framework, Padraic Brady has posted the next in the series - a look at what it would take to make the integration happen.

The ideal was to move away from line-by-line setup and manipulation of Zend instances towards a more simplified model which is standardised for any PHPSpec specs.

He's already created an "experimental branch" to work inside of and some of these updates have been made to the trunk for the release of PHPSpec 0.3.0. The key that he found was in getting the customization of the "Zend Context operational to set up elements of the FrontController". He also includes a simple example of the extended functionality in action - simple interface methods to work with Twitter.

Padraic Brady has made a few updates to the PHPSpec software he's developed in preparation for the first stable release - additions to the reporting functionality to give as much information as possible.

PHPSpec is closing in on its first stable release, so the time had finally come to spruce up its output! No more the simple reporting of failed specs - now you get a few more details in a readable format, exceptions and errors even come with traces. In addition, I've implemented specdoc output as an option (using "-s") so you can get a list of specs in their plain text form.

He's also included an example of the new output in the post as well, showing the results of both successful and errored responses. You can check out the actual spec files on the googlecode repository for the project and get more details on the project itself (including the latest development snapshots) on the project's website.