Sebastian Bergmann

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 :-)