Sebastian Bergmann

Yesterday I migrated my desktop box from Windows XP Professional SP-2 to Windows Vista 64. I encountered no problems during the installation and I have to say that I am impressed with Vista's performance (it boots at least twice as fast as Windows XP).

I only use Windows as a host operating system (because I use proprietary software such as DxO Optics Pro and like to play the occasional game that does not run (well) on Linux) and do all my work in virtual machine that runs Linux.

The only real (and sort of ironic) showstopper that I have with Windows Vista 64 is that DxO Optics Pro, one of the pieces of software that I need Windows for in the first place, is not compatible with Vista 64. The software itself starts up fine but it cannot be activated because its activation service segfaults. It even does that inside a virtual machine with a 32-bit installation of Windows XP Professional SP-2, which is really weird.

And if you wonder why I migrated from Windows XP Professional SP-2 to Windows Vista 64: I upgraded my box's RAM from 2GB to 4GB so that I could give my virtual machine(s) more memory.

Maybe I should just dual-boot between Windows XP (for DxO and games) and Linux for work ...

Together with my peers Matthew Weier O'Phinney and Mike Naberenzy, I will present a tutorial titled "PHP Development Best Practices and Unit Testing" at this year's ZendCon that is held October 8-11 2007 in San Francisco, CA.

PHP development by teams of developers introduces challenges beyond the mere coding of great algorithms. Agreements are needed about tools, specifications, architecture, design patterns, coding standards, testing, documentation, source code control, staging and deployment. This tutorial session aims to introduce developers to a set of best practices that will help them deliver applications fast and move them to deployment with confidence.

Last year's ZendCon was a blast and I am really looking forward to this year's edition.

I will present a full-day training on PHPUnit in cooperation with the Linux Hotel on October 1st 2007.

Reserve your seat now!

The last weeks have been busy, but now I want to take the time to finally give you an update on the status of PHPUnit.

The development of PHPUnit 3.1 is progressing nicely, about the only thing missing is finishing the documentation for all the new features. Speaking of features, let's take a look at what PHPUnit 3.1 has in store:

• Improvements to Mock Objects include the ability to mock classes and methods that do not exist as well as mocking static methods. And mocked methods can raise exceptions now.
• PHPUnit's Selenium RC extension no longer uses the Testing_Selenium PEAR package but its own implementation of the Selenium RC client/server protocol. Among other benefits, this allows for the collection of code coverage data for Selenium tests.
• PHPUnit can now write test result and code coverage data to a test database. Several ideas for future features depend on this data.
• New template methods, PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase::sharedAssertions(), PHPUnit_Framework_TestSuite::setUp(), PHPUnit_Framework_TestSuite::tearDown(), and PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase::defaultAssertions(), ease the development of test cases.
• And lots of smaller improvements all over the place.

The development of two major features is being done in separate branches:

• Mike Lewis, who participates in the Google Summer of Code 2007, implements Mutation Testing for PHPUnit on the mutation_testing branch.
• Michael Lively Jr. is porting DbUnit to PHP and PHPUnit on the dbunit branch.

I hope to release PHPUnit 3.1 well before the end of next month. Then I can finally start working on PHPUnit 4 :-)