In a new post to his blog Matthew Turland looks at a contribution he recently made to the PHPunit project to help it support database testing without the need for dumping the contents of your database out to a CSV.

If you're using MySQL as your database, CSV has been the only format supported by both the mysqldump utility and the PHPUnit Database extension up to this point. My contribution adds support for its XML format to the extension. While this support was developed to work in the PHPUnit 3.4.x branch, it won't be available in a stable release until 3.5.0. In the meantime, this is how you can use it now.

There's four steps you'll need to do to get it installed - grab the latest from github, create the seed data XML file, make a test case extending PHPUnit_Extensions_Database_TestCase and run your tests against the database information.

Giorgio Sironi has a new post talking about his upcoming eBook for all of those interesting in testing PHP applications - "Practical PHP Testing (Don't Let Your PHP be Eaten Alive)".

This publication focuses on testing and designing php code, with the aid of the leading tool for test automation, PHPUnit. Testing is a skill which is often neglected by php developers, but testable code inherit many benefits of the good design rules it is forced to observe.

The book will include the content of his testing series of posts, code examples, a glossary of commonly used terms and several Test-Driven Development exercises in each chapter. He looking to have it published during the beginning of December and will be released under a Creative Commons license. Here's a sneak peek at the cover.

Giorgio Sironi has just wrapped up his posts in a series on practical testing of PHP applications with PHPUnit in nine parts:

What is unit testing and why a php programmer should adopt it? It may seem simple, but testing is the only way to ensure your work is completed and you will not called in the middle of the night by a client whose website is going nuts. [...] Unit testing is the process of writing tests which exercise the basic functionality of the smallest cohesive unit in php: a class.

Here's a list of the topics covered in the series:

• part 1: PHPUnit usage
• part 2: write clever tests
• part 3: assertions
• part 4: fixtures
• part 5: annotations
• part 6: refactoring and patterns
• part 7: stubs
• part 8: mocks
• part 9: command line options

The php|architect blog has posted the second part of Cal Evans' series looking at the typical lifecycle of a project - Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production.

In the previous part of this series, we discussed the main pieces needed for a proper development environment. However, there are other, smaller pieces, scripts, subsystems and other very important components of a properly-configured development environment that don't fit in the acronym.

This second part of the series looks at the "T" in DTAP - testing. It mentions unit testing, integration testing and regression testing. He also touches briefly on "refresh scripts" to handle data updates or pushes out to another stage of the process.

The PHPClasses.org blog has posted a new book review of the APress book "Pro PHP: Patterns, Frameworks, Testing and More" (Kevin McArthur).

If you really want to improve your PHP skills to be at the enterprise level, you must read this book. Despite there are several other PHP books about OOP, I have never seen a book that addresses the subject so deeply and, at the same time, keeping it simple.

The reviewer looks at what the book covers - PHP6, documentation, Phing, SPL and much more. Check out the full review for more on what the reviewer thought.

In this new post to her blog Lorna Mitchell talks a bit about the upcoming TestFest event happening in Manchester next weekend and what she's learned about testing PHP to make things flow a bit smoother for her while there (and you, should you want to write tests in the future).

In preparation I decided it was high time to sit down and figure out what testing PHP is all about. People kept telling me it was easy but I had no clear picture of how all the pieces went together - there are different ways of doing the same thing and although I have been keen to get involved with testing for some time, I haven't been able to get started until now.

She looks at the automated tests as a part of the build ("make test") and some of the screens from the lcov testing results. She also recommends reading up on the phpt documentation to help you get going.

Keith Casey has announced the first (ever) Release Candidate of the web2Project project management system that follows "the concept of a Rich Internet Application (RIA) we will be providing an interactive and effective way of managing projects."

I could talk about commits, issue counts, etc, but that's actually the least important part...As of early morning EST on 13 April 2009, the web2project Release Candidate is live: web2project-v1.0-rc1.tar.gz

His post details some of the recent improvements to the software - fixes to Department filters, a major update to Cascading Tasks and a call for testing from the development community.

You can try out a demo of the tool here and learn more about it in this webcast.

On the Quality Assurance in PHP Projects site, Mike Lively has written up a few thoughts on how developers and development environments should work with testing databases as resources (case study).

Proper interaction with relational databases is incredibly important in most pieces of software. The importance of this interaction is underscored by the fact that many software architectures have at least one entire layer or system devoted to data persistence and data loading. When dealing with critical data in enterprise level applications it becomes even more important to make sure your data is being stored and retrieved correctly.

He talks about a case study on the topic (still in development) that will talk about testing techniques, functionality and how to create the tests needed to ensure your development environment can correctly use the database resource via unit tests and functional tests.

Noting the lack of a good, independent library for creating Mock Objects for unit testing PHP scripts, Padraic Brady (with assistance from Travis Swicegood) has come up with a standalone Mock Object and Stub framework - Mockery.

It's not tailored specifically to any one testing framework, rather it's an entirely separate framework with a discrete API. The idea is that you can use this framework within PHPUnit, or SimpleTest, or anything else really, without being forced to rely on the built-in support (if any) that test framework provides. Mockery was designed specifically to implement a form of Domain Specific Language (DSL). It makes extensive use of a fluent interface mixed with methods to approximate plain English.

He includes an overview of what Mock Objects and Stubs are and how to set them up with the Mockery tool. He finishes things off with a look at the Mockery and Mock Object Expectation APIs. You can grab this first release either as a PEAR package or from its github page.

Michelangelo van Dam has posted his summary of the recent BugHuntDay that happened in Roosendaal (the Netherlands) this past weekend:

Bughuntday is a whole day developers can come together to start fixing bugs for open-source frameworks and libraries. This Saturday we started these series with Zend Framework, a hugely adopted PHP framework within enterprise and professional web application development.

He also includes the slides from the presentation and a video of Jurien Stutterheim's talk introducing everyone to testing and the Zend Framework. There's pictures of the event on Flickr too.

Check here for an updated video from the event.