JApacheCon

13 Dec 2005

I'm at JApacheCon (ApacheCon that has been infested with Java) this week in sunny San Diego. On Sunday, Geoff Young and I gave our tutorial, Power PHP Testing, which went really well. Most of the attendees had PHP experience and no testing experience, so it was a perfect fit.

We covered testing theory as well as some practical examples using phpt, Simple-Test, PHPUnit, and (of course) Apache-Test. We have tarballs for each framework that provide everything you need (I'll link to these in another post), including a Makefile so that make test runs your test suite.

The challenge with being the authors of one of the testing frameworks is that we are obviously biased. (This is stated in the abstract.) Our approach was to try to make every testing framework shine as much as possible, because the purpose of the talk is to encourage testing in the PHP community, regardless of which tool is used. I'll probably elaborate later, but here are some of the things we did for each framework:

The biggest difference between the various frameworks is how failures are handled, and this is where Apache-Test shines. With some enhancements to the TAP reporter for Simple-Test, however, I think it can be just as good. I'll probably blog about this separately after speaking with the authors of the other frameworks, because I want to make sure that we're highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of each framework fairly.

The conference has been great for the hallway conversations and the opportunity to meet and work with other speakers and attendees, but the interesting sessions are few and far between. Andrei Zmievski's recent comment, "2:00 is the next real session," sums this up nicely.