I had fun this weekend at the PHP London Test Fest, it was a great opportunity to learn something new and meet some great programmers.

The tests our team took on were based around the SPLiterators I hadn’t used this part of PHP before and it was a great way to learn about it, especially as many of the functions we tested aren’t documented yet.

There are two main options for unit testing PHP: simpletest and phpunit

They both do a lot of the same stuff, both have the ability to run suites of tests and create mock objects.

Simpletest has a built in webTestCase which allows you to perform some integration as well as unit testing.

An example web test for simpletest is:

There are times you really really want to be sure your code doesn’t have any bugs at all.

This is one of those times.

I just read an interesting article about Windows 7 - it will include a virtual machine to run windows XP for backwards compatibility.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9132177

The article points out that this has the drawback of extra maintenance.

Oh cool :-)

I just noticed that selenium IDE has the option to export tests as PHP unit tests.

As well as following standards such as those laid down by www.w3.org I always try and test websites I develop across a range of browsers. Despite improvements in compatibility in recent years, browsers do still vary in implementation and even relatively minor browsers are still used by large numbers of people.

However all this testing can be hard to keep on top of and sometimes I just have to push out what seems like a small code change with only limited testing.

I’m aiming to automate as much testing as possible, this is a little more work up front - but makes re-running tests trivial and so more likely to happen.

I decided to upgrade  VirtualBox because the newer versions have much better support for networks that allow virtual computer to be visible on the real network.

But after upgrade I encountered the error

HostInterface’: The attribute ’name’ is required but missing.

It seems others have had similar issues

I recently finished work on a project that really suffered from a lack of build tools.

It was a large project, and while many of us were keen on writing tests we weren’t able to get management sign of to spend some time automating the test process. So even though we did some of the work we didn’t get all the benefits.

It was really frustrating to come back to a piece of work that was well covered by unit tests, only to find those tests broken

I’ve just been reading some good stuff on developing accessible web applications that still benefit from rich interactivity. http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/ http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-to-wai-aria/ http://www.iheni.com/screen-reader-testing/ http://wiki.codetalks.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page I’ve been keen on building accessible websites for a long time, and I find everyone benefits from this - well developed accessible sites are just easier for everyone to use. What’s great is that it can be as simple as just clearly defining the navigation areas of the site, or as complex as adding a semantic layer on top of a full application.

I’ve been intrigued by git for a while, but as a long time user of svn I’m kinda cautious about moving on.

So today I had some time and used it to read up on the pros and cons, as well as try things out a bit.

It seems to me that git is clearly the better system; but that svn has the advantage of maturity.