After trying to get code coverage reports and unit testing with PHPUnit and XDebug to work, Matthew Weir O'Phinney succeeded and got the reports running. Fortunately, he's shared how he's done it and an example of how to run the report.

I've been playing with PHPUnit a lot of late, particularly with framework development. One thing that's always hard to determine is how well your code is exercised -- basically, how much of the code is tested in the unit tests?

He gives an "executive summary" of how to get XDebug working and playing nice with PHPUnit as well as something a bit more detailed, following his experience with getting things up and running.

Sebastian Bergmann has posted an official call for help for a PHPUnit-related project that seems to be a more and more requested feature for the popular unit testing package - an Ajax-based test runner.

It would be great if the frontend for the browser-based test runner would make use of AJAX. Since I am clueless when it comes to both web design in general and AJAX in particular, I would appreciate if someone else could help me with implementing this test runner.

He's looking for the XHTML, CSS, and Javascript to put it all together as well as the Javascript that makes the magic happen. If you're interested in helping out, you can either contact him on the mailing list or in #phpunit on the Freenode IRC network.

PHPUnit fans can finally rejoice that the latest version of their much loved PHP unit testing utility - PHPUnit3 - has finally been released as a stable download.

Sebastian Bergmann and his contributors are proud to announce the immediate availability of PHPUnit 3. This release is a major improvement to the popular open source testing solution for PHP applications. It includes new features and bug fixes. Further details about this release can be found in the ChangeLog.

In his newest blog post, Sebastian lists some of the main new features this release offers - mock objects, selenium integration, and code-coverage support. There's even a brief installation howto and some on how to upgrade from the previous PHPUnit 2.3 to the latest.

Trying to adhere to the philosophy of "release early and release often", Felix Geisendorfer has posted a new item with the latest version of his testing application for the CakePHP framework - CakeTester.

The truth is, the poorest programmer of all is the ones that doesn't release. Because what good am I doing to the world when tinkering for for month on things people are in bad need for today, just to make myself look like all code I ever write is perfect the first time. None at all.

He links to the download and provides some basic install/usage instructions including a code sample (and a screenshot) to get you started.

In his latest blog post, Chris Hartjes gives us an update on one of the packages (components?) for the Zend Framework - the Zend_Service_Audioscrobbler.

He talks about, though his time is a bit more stretched than usual, he's managed to get some real work done on the package. He gives some code examples to show off what this new development is (complete with unit tests - go agile testing!).

That bit of code is what does all the heavy lifting for me. It uses the Zend_Service_Rest component to talk to Audioscrobbler's web services, and returns the results as a SimpleXML object. Nice and simple. A perfect example of what Zend Framework is trying to accomplish.

The second code example is the tests that he's generated to check the package for errors in grabbing the 'Top Artists' and 'Top Tracks' as grabbed by the package via the REST web service.

Sebastian Bergmann notes today that he has release this third beta version of the upcoming PHPUnit 3 release, a popular unit testing framework for PHP.

A list of features is available as well as a list of changes. You can install PHPUnit using the PEAR Installer.

PHPUnit 3.0 is the (coming soon) version of PHPUnit - both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results.

In the final part of their series looking at unit testing in PHP, DevShed has this new tutorial that looks at using graphical interfaces with the unit tests you've already generated. It's another excerpt from the George Schlossnage book "Advanced PHP Programming".

Because PHP is a Web-oriented language, you might want an HTML-based user interface for running your unit tests. PHPUnit comes bundled with this ability, using PHPUnit_WebUI_TestRunner::run(). This is in fact a nearly identical framework to TextUI; it simply uses its own listener to handle generate HTML-beautified output.

He looks at test driven design, a simple "Flesch Score Calculator" class, testing a "Word" class (with PHPUnit), and creating the Bug Report of the output of it all. Finally, he builds up a simple web interface to make running the tests and getting the reports nice and easy.

Continuing in their effort to help PHP developers keep their code bug-free, DevShed has posted part two of the series looking at unit testing your applications. Previously they had looked at the basics - of they work and what they're for. This time, they dig a little deeper, showing some of the additional features and conditions that PHPUnit has to offer.

This week, you will learn about running multiple tests simultaneously, creating more informative error messages, and more.

They get back into something they mentioned briefly before - packaging tests in a separate archive to keep it out of the main body of code (the same way separating content and display functionality is good). They also talk about how to run more than one test at the same time, a handy feature that lets you make regression tests.

They also show how to create more informative error messages and how to manually add more testing conditions for you to check custom bits of code that don't quite fit with the assertNull, assertEquals, and assertFalse crowd.

This article is an excerpt from the Sams Publishing book "Advanced PHP Programming" by George Schlossnagle.