PHPUnit

Over the year's I've kind of gone back and forth on SimpleTest, a PHP-based unit test framework.

A few years ago, when PHPUnit was in its infancy, SimpleTest was the best PHP-based unit test framework. In the past few years, however, it seems like PHPUnit has been improved continually, while SimpleTest has languished somewhat.

Currently, I believe PHPUnit is the best choice for true "unit" ("micro") testing, while SimpleTest seems to be better for modest functional (integration) testing.

As part of my Hudson CI server, I'm trying to run Selenium-based PHPUnit tests with each build. The build machine is an virtual machine (VirtualBox) running Ubuntu desktop.

Initially, my tests weren't running thru Hudson and the associated build.xml file. This wasn't surprising since I had forgotten to start the Selenium RC server.

In this post, I'm just trying to get the simplest setup. I'll try to post details in a subsequent post.

Here are three posts, in descending order, on this that I found useful :

http://toptopic.wordpress.com/2009/02/26/php-and-hudson/

http://blog.jepamedia.org/2009/10/28/continuous-integration-for-php-with...

http://www.davegardner.me.uk/blog/2009/11/09/continuous-integration-for-...

First, I had to install java :

    $ sudo aptitude install sun-java6-jre  

A while back I spent some time evaluating unit test frameworks from front-end web testing. A key driver is the need to handle JavaScript forms.

Here are some thoughts on those test frameworks :

- PHPUnit : Good for back-end work, but weak with front-end (browser) work

- SimpleTest : Same as PHPUnit

- Watir : Very mature and popular browser test app, but requires knowledge of Ruby scripting language

- IeUnit : Not quite as popular as Watir, but mature IE test framework. Scriptable in JavaScript