The International PHP Magazine has posted their latest results from this past week’s poll. They asked readers to vote on which of the options they wanted most to see in PHPUnit projects.
Tying for first place were the two open-ended options, “All” and “None” - both with 17.8% percent of the votes. Falling down to the next slot was the “Web interface for Test Result Database” option, followed by “Support for Distributed Testing”.
Be sure to cast your vote in this week’s poll too. They ask you, the reader, to vote which of the features listed is the best that the PHPExcel package has to offer (including “Setting Spreadsheet Meta Data” and “Adding Images to your Spreadsheet”).
On the Riff Blog, there’s a quick new post about how he integrated the Zend_Config_Xml component of the Zend Framework with a simple PHP-GTK application.
I had been in need of a class to read config data into both the PHP-GTK OSInet back-office front end, and the back-office client UI for the Drupal 5.x offload module, and hesitated between various solutions, ranging from roll-our-own to the various frameworks out there and the existing PEAR packages.
To fill the need, he gave the Zend Framework a shot and was quite pleased with the results. He gives the sample XML content he pulled in and parsed and the PHP code he used inside the framework to get the job done.
In the spirit of the Month of PHP Bugs going on right now (March 2007), Justin Silverton has spotlighted just a few of them in a new entry to the JSLabs blog today.
He mentions issues like:
- a header() issue that results from a call to it with an all-whitespace string
- a session issue in PHP5 where an identifier isn’t freed correctly
- and an issue with the compress.bzip2 URL wrapper not following safe_mode or open_basedir restrictions (already corrected).
These are just a few of the bugs that have been reported during the month-long event, so check out php-security.org. He also points to the Suhosin patch that can help alleviate some of these issues.
In a new blog entry, Alexander Netkachev writes about his experiences with the automatic testing of applications developed with the Zend Framework.
This article contains information on how to improve your application stability by controlling how the changes affect the Model-View-Controller Zend Framework application. As a result, you will be able to deliver better software to your customers and reduce the time needed for testing of the software.
He breaks the post out into several different sections:
- Testing should be automatic
- Program tests program
- MVC improves testability
- MVC application creating is easy with Zend Framework
- Select and modify data to test Model
- View is simple but unsteady
- Testing View includes testing Ajax
- Use cases show how to test Controller
before getting down to an example. His example shows hos to test the part of an application that handles the new user registrations/logins. The setup is pretty simple - a user table with a UsersController - and the corresponding model and views to go with it. He chooses PHPUnit to perform the testing and gives all the code you’ll need to reproduce the example, including the SQL and the testing scripts (and the output you should recieve by running them).