Zend Developer Zone: Acceptance Testing of Web Applications with PHP
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From the Zend Developer Zone, there's a tutorial covering acceptance testing of web applications, specifically using PHPUnit and Selenium.   In this article I introduce the topic of Acceptance Testing (aka Functional Testing), something more PHP programmers should be starting to practice. I'm sure many of us are well aware of Unit Testing and even Integration Testing so where does this third wheel come into play for web applications given our growing obsession with Web 2.0 and AJAX and how does it differ from the former two practices? Below I'll explain this.   They start by asking "Why acceptance testing?" at all with an answer of "it's not about isolated testing, but testing as a whole". The rest of the article is broken up into several parts:   Of User Stories and Acceptance Tests The Iteration Plan Preparing For Acceptance Testing (setting up PHPUnit and Selenium) Writing And Running The Acceptance Tests How to run the tests   In their example they show how to validate that a login on the site works as expected (including interacting with a form on the page).
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The Zend Developer Zone has an announcement about another "Webinar Wednesday" that Zend is putting on June 20th focusing on the Zend Framework (version 1.0).   The Zend Framework is emerging as the preferred PHP programmer's toolkit for designing Web applications with best practices. In the month's prior to the 1.0 release, Zend Framework had over 1 million downloads and multiple commercial products are already being developed with Zend Framework. In this webinar, Bill Karwin, Product Engineering Manager, will provide an overview of the design philosophy, the major components of the framework and its future directions. Topics will cover MVC, Search, Data Access, Web Services, Filter, Authentication, Cache and more.   You can sign up by going to the conference's website and entering all of your information. Details on how to connect and when will be sent to your email. The event if free of charge, so there's no reason not to come and get the latest scoop on this powerful framework's upcoming version.
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Cal Evans and the Zend Developer Zone are hosting a new contest for all of the avid PHP readers out there - a giveaway for free PHP-related books.   There are a lot of good programming contests out there for PHP programmers to enter and win. Most of them require you to write a piece of code or solve a problem. There's nothing wrong with that but programmers are busy people. So I've come up with a contest for busy programmers. Give blog about PHP Abstract and you could win a free book. Not just any book though, these are programming books. (you know the ones, when you go to check out at your favorite book store they charge you by the pound.)   Entering the contest is simple - just blog about your favorite episode of PHP Abstract (DevZone's great podcast series) and get it tracked on Technorati.    Cal will scan the listings each week and pick the one he likes the best. He'll send along the book of his choice and will spring for the postage to send it along. Nice and easy - so check out their podcast series and find an episode you like the best (or just talk about it in general) and get it tracked.   Click here to subscribe to their podcast in your favorite feed reader.
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In a new post to his blog today, Matthew O'Phinney dives in to some of the more advanced features that the Zend_Form component of the Zend Framework has to offer.   I've been working on  for the past few weeks, and it's nearing release readiness. There are a number of features that Cal didn't cover in his DevZone coverage (in part because some of them weren't yet complete) that I'd like to showcase.   These additional features include internationalization, element grouping and array support. He looks at each of these, including some sample code where needed, and shows you how they can be useful to you and your ZF application.
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Cal Evans of the Zend Developer Zone has posted a new book review for one of Sams Publishing's latest PHP-related offerings, "PHP 5 In Practice" by Elliott "Eli" White III (Senior Programmer over at digg.com.   First let me say, if you are new to PHP or programming in general, skip this book. This is not a how to or even a cookbook for simple concepts. To get the most from this book you need to have a firm grounding in programming.   He sets the tone for the rest of the interview right there, noting that most of the book is made up of little examples, helpful bits to fill a need rather than teaching you the basics (or more advanced features) of PHP as a language. Cal spotlights this kind of content by talking about the "binary tree implementation" section. Check out the rest of the review for the full story.
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In this new post to his blog today, Raphael Stolt shows how to combine the Zend Framework and Phing to create a simple, quick setup utility for future ZF projects.   After spending too much time on directory and view script shifting to align an 'older' Zend Framework application to the very useful ViewRenderer Action Helper of the follow-up releases I crafted a single Phing buildfile to stick to the recommended conventions and to have a nearly 'one-button' setup solution for any upcoming projects.    He'd found some other packages that did something similar, but wanted to do it with Phing. He includes the requirements (the software) features that the buildfile makes easy to include and some future improvements that could be made to the install to make things even easier. The buildfile is included and any path or configuration changes that might need to be made.    Phing is a "make" replacement that uses XML build files to define tasks in classes.
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Here's what was popular in the PHP community one year ago today:Community News: PHP 5.2.1 ReleasedZend Developer Zone: Zend_Acl / Zend_Auth example scenarioJSLabs Blog:  5 tips for creating high performance web appsRob Allen's Blog: Modules (Zend Framework)Alexander Netkachev's Blog: How to use Zend Framework Controller/Action approach?DevShed: Using Abstract Factory Classes in PHP 5 to Work with Online FormsWebCheatSheet.com: Two New Tutorials - Database Export & Sending EmailIlia Alshanetsky's Blog: Month of PHP BugsWindows Skills Blog: Using SQLite as a database backend for a lightweight serverCommunity News: DreamStats "rootpath" File Inclusion Vulnerability IdentifiedPHP.net: PHP Manual UpdatesCommunity News: MySQL native driver for PHP - mysqlndAlexander Netkachev's Blog: Controller/Action versus Folder/PageSymfony Project: Online doc interface improvedFelix Geisendorfer's Blog: Making error handling for Model::save more beautiful in CakePHP
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted their latest PHP Abstract podcast today hosted by Ed Finkler and focusing on security and development environments.   Topics discusses include:   Ruby on Rails Security Blog Top Ten Security Vulnerabilities: Part One SQL Injection @ .Net Developers Journal CERIAS home page   As always, you can directly grab the show from here or subscribe to the podcast feed to keep up with the latest articles.
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Matthew O'Phinney has a reminder for anyone in the Burlington, VT area tonight - there's a meeting of the Burlington PHP user group tonight at 5:30pm.   Bradley Holt will be giving a presentation on developing a web application using Zend Framework. Bradley Holt is founder and web developer for Found Line, a local design and development studio which has used Zend Framework in several recent projects.    You can get more information about the meetup from this event page on their Google Groups site (happening at the Brown & Jenkins Coffee Roasters).
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The Zend Developer Zone has posted the latest episode of their PHP Abstract podcast hosted by Rob Richards and covering service oriented architectures in PHP.   Our special guest today is Rob Richards. Rob is an author and maintainer of many of the XML-based extensions of PHP 5, as well as one of the maintainers of libxml2. He is also the author of Pro PHP and Web Services, published by Apress. Rob is going to give us an overview of Service Oriented Architecture and what it means to us as PHP developers.   The direct link to grab the show is here, but you'd be doing yourself a favor to subscribe to the podcast feed and get all of the great content on a wide variety of topics presented by the experts.
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Following on the heels of these comments from Alexander Netkachev, the Zend Developer Zone has posted the full project plan for the next release of the PHP IDE Zend is working on, version 0.7.   The plan of the 0.7 version is based on the initial SRS which is available here. On top of that SRS many bugs were submitted together with enhancement requests that were/will be included in the 0.7 release. You can find all PHP IDE open bugs here.   The announcement is broken up into three sections - the release deliverables, the release milestones, and the target operating environments - each with plenty of details to show you exactly what the team is working towards.
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Ben Ramsey, a speaker at both the Zend/PHP Conference 2006 and the International PHP Conference 2006, has posted a monster wrap up for both events to his blog today.   This post is long overdue, but I was finally able to sit down and type out my thoughts about the Zend/PHP Conference and Expo and the International PHP Conference.    First up is his look at the Zend conference - largely a good experience. He specifically mentions the talk from Rob Richards, the "Extending PHP" tutorial session (with Sara and Marcus), and the infamous misunderstanding about his laptop bag (which was resolved shortly after the conference had concluded).   His experience with the International PHP Conference went equally well, despite the location of the event being slightly more out of the way than some liked. He comments on the excellent conference materials provided, the types of attendees, and some of the talks he attended - Aaron Wormus' "Mastering enterprise-level PHP tools PEAR, PhpDocumentor and testing" and Sata Golemon's "Navigating Streams" being among them. If you like to check them out, he's also posted some photos of the conference and a night out around the town he took.
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Zend has a new download for those out there interested in using PHP on a Sun Java System Web Server - the PHP Enabler for the Java System Web Server.
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Cal Evans is attending this year's php/db|works conference up in Toronto and has reported back with his summary of the first day of the conference - "Tutorial Day".   Day One at php|works was dedicated to tutorials. Paul Reinheimer did a 6 hour crash course for those who wanted to take the Zend Certification Test here at the conference. I talked with a three attendees at the Crash Course to get their opinion on how it was going. Cairan Walsh, who is not currently Zend Certified found the course interested although he thought maybe it was a bit too basic.   Cal notes that just about everyone that attended the "Crash Course" was pleased with the contents/teacher/etc. He also mentions his visits to the "Advanced XML and Web Services" and "Extending PHP" tutorials.
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Popular posts from PHPDeveloper.org for the past week:PHP-Coding-Practices.com: Try-Catch Syntax WeirdnessPHPBuilder.com: Cross-Platform Database PHP DevelopmentIBM developerWorks: Java and PHP technology on AIX - Integrate the Java business application w/ DB2OpenSourceCommunity.org: What do you think makes a good CMS?Jonathan Snook's Blog: Elemental: Conditional Content with CakePHPDevShed: The Basics of Using the Factory Pattern in PHP 5Builder.com.au: PHP exploit code plants itself in GIFJohn Cox's Blog:  Linux.com Now PHP PoweredNick Halstead's Blog: Solving Programming ProblemsPHP-Tools Blog: Testing FIT
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Nick Halstead has announced a contest on his blog today for PHP developers everywhere to participate in - a programming competition surrounding a challenge he's created.   It has been a lot harder than I thought to come up with a fair programming challenge that would not take too long or require lots of knowledge in any particular framework or other associated technology. It could have been to make use of a whole host of currently available API's and to make a useful mash-up but these again require other external knowledge beyond just PHP. I finally settled on a logic problem that is hopefully not too hard to solve but will test a range of PHP skills.   The problem he's worked up involves changing a word, one letter at a time, into another word using user-defined lists and choice of word. There's several requirements you'll need to follow an d rules for things like the submission process and what server setup can be used.   So, what's the motivation? First prize is a copy of Zend Studio Professional and a year of support, second prize is a Zend t-shirt, and third is a Zend Pen. For full information on participating and on all of the rules you'll need to follow, check out Nick's full post.
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Zend has a new tutorial posted in their PHP 101 series - PHP 101 (part 9): SQLite My Fire!