SimpleTest 1.0!
Marcus Baker has released SimpleTest version 1.0! Download the files here and view the API documentation here. Congratulations Marcus, this is a fine work and an outstanding contribution to the PHP community.
For anyone who has not caught testing fever, try it out. There has been no other programming practice which has positively affected my programming practices the way unit testing and test driven development have.
I alluded to my in progress book in an earlier post. Each of the examples in the book was developed with unit testing coverage using SimpleTest, and all of these tests will be available in the source code download for the book. I hope the book shows good coding practices as well as demonstrating design patterns in PHP.
Can’t wait to get familiar with it
The code looks very promising.
This may be interesting – http://greg.chiaraquartet.net/archives/19-Its-official-pear.chiaraquartet.net-is-live.html
Looks like it should be possible to run this off from Sourceforge. Would basically allow PEAR to be used for SimpleTest without actually being part of PEAR.
So the gist of this thing is you could do
pear install http://channel.simpletest.org/
to get simpletest installed?
Just been playing with it. A “channel” means basically a server, capable of publishing any libraries the owner wants.
First stage is to register the channel with the client, something like;
pear channel-discover http://simpletest.sourceforge.net/channel/
Then there’s some kind of aliasing that happens, I guess defined by the server, that would mean users could work like;
pear install lastcraft/simpletest
and later
pear upgrade lastcraft/simpletest
Where lastcraft is an alias for the channel server.
The idea looks very cool and messing with the client, so far no problems. Immediately have a feature request – the ability for channels to mirror or syndicate each other, so dependencies can be resolved across servers. At the same time, this could be a real problem with namespaces.
Seems Greg has thought of everything 😉 Just read this http://greg.chiaraquartet.net/archives/15-Dependencies-in-PEAR-1.4.0,-Part-1.html – dependencies on packages from other channels is possible. Some more interesting reading on dependencies here: http://greg.chiaraquartet.net/archives/21-Dependencies-in-PEAR-1.4.0,-Part-2.html
I’m just wondering why you have decided to use SimpleTest and not PHPUnit(2). I am not asking to start a flame war, but to know what direction would be best for my next project and would like to choose the best one that will be around for awhile.
It seems like PHPUnit is more “official” with bearing part of PEAR. However I was able to get SimpleTest to work immediately, and as of yet been unable to make PHPUnit2 work with my PHP5 installation. From reading the post at http://www.sebastian-bergmann.de/blog/archives/503-Comparing-PHPUnit2-and-SimpleTest.html it seems like the main reason would be mocks, which seems like they are going to be appearing soon.