In this new post to his blog, Philip Norton reminds you about a handy feature of PHPUnit, the popular PHP unit testing tool, that can make generating tests for your application simpler - the skeleton class generator.

If you create classes in PHP then you should be unit testing them as much as you can. Setting up unit testing classes for your code can be time consuming and involve a bunch of copying and pasting. Thankfully, PHPUnit comes with a couple of helper functions that allow the creation of unit testing classes automatically, which can save a bit of copying and pasting.

He includes an example of a class named "Spider" and shows both the contents of the class and the resulting test that comes from running "phpunit --skeleton-test" on it. The resulting test has methods for each method in your class and marks them all as incomplete. As Philip notes, this is a good start but should never be relied upon as a test to leave as-is.

In the continuing development of his online PHP-based game, Pádraic Brady has created a simple class to help with mapping out the objects/structures in the game. He shares the code for this in his latest blog post.

The code sets the stage for the Redux mapping system. Basically, we're aiming at a grid-based map with each grid coordinate representing a Sector.

Right now, it's just a skeleton structure, but it already has some of the key bits of functionality in place. The Redux_Map class manages the requests coming back and forth between the client and server, and the Redux_Map_Grid class helps to generate a grid structure of the objects found in that sector.

He even includes the unit tests for testing the Redux_Map_Grid class to ensure everything's in tip top shape. Next on his list is adding actual entities to the game - planets, facilities, etc.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted another update about the upcoming PHPUnit 3 project, this time concrening the improved skeleton generator that's been put in place.

PHPUnit can help you write your tests by analyzing the code of an existing class and generating a skeleton test-case class for it. With PHPUnit 3 this feature will be more powerful as it now supports @test annotations in the class source.

To illustrate the point, he gives a bit of code for a calculator class with a single add() method. When the skeleton generator gets its hands on it though, it spits back out a complete testing suite with predefined functions ready for your assertions (and completely valid, even without them).

On Dikiki.net today, there's a new post that's a continuation of a series (first post, second post) dealing with macro programming in PHP.

Without going into theoretical details, some of which are quite alien to me, I'll try to describe some of the challenges that pattern patching rewriting macros might pose for a language like php. After brief explanation what kind of a beast is this, I try to explore some of the finer points, which might cause problems. The intent of this post is to sketch a design and highlight some of the possible issues.

He breaks up the post into a few sections:

• pattern matching rewrite only macros - a bird eye view
• Transformation time
• Basic/skeleton shapes and intermediate shapes
• Code generation issues specific to php
• Hygiene
• A rough macro shape outline
• Output/Status of the project

There are code examples (of how it should work) and explainations of the issues PHP would face to accomplish this goal.