Sebastian Bergmann

Something is happening on the "IDE Support for PHPUnit" front (finally):

PHPEdit 2.12



WaterProof SARL has released version 2.12 of its PHPEdit IDE. Its support for PHPUnit is described here and here. A screencast is also available.

Zend Studio



Zend Technologies Ltd. is getting ready to start the beta cycle for the next major version of its Zend Studio IDE that sits on top of Eclipse and the PHP Development Tools (PDT). You can have a sneak peek at what its PHPUnit support looks like here.

It would be great, though, if someone develops a free PHPUnit support for the Eclipse PHP Development Tools (PDT) project (or for vim for which there is already SimpleTest support :-) If you are using PHPEclipse, there is still the SimpleTest plugin for PHPEclipse that also supports PHPUnit.

Steven Balthazor sent me a first version of his PHPUnit integration for PHPEclipse today.

The PHPUnit part of this (a TestListener that communicates via a socket with Eclipse) has been committed to CVS. Stephen has made his plugin code available here.

What I am missing most in PHPEclipse, and any other development environment currently available for PHP, is support for Refactoring and of course for PHPUnit.

PHPEclipse currently only has (apparently broken) support for the old implementation of PHPUnit that is hosted on SourceForge.net and has not been updated since 2000.

I offered the PHPEclipse development team help in developing proper support for PHPUnit in the past, to no avail so far. I also talked to the developers of Zend Studio about PHPUnit support for their IDE. Hopefully the next version will support it, we'll see.

Over the last couple of years I did several presentations at conferences as well as workshops, consultings and trainings on PHPUnit where I was asked by developers who are using PHPUnit (to test business critical banking applications, for instance) why I do not support any IDE. My answer to this has been, and still is, that while I develop PHPUnit I don't have the time, and in the case of Zend Studio, for instance, not even the means, to integrate it into IDEs. For this I depend on the support of the IDE vendors.

If you are a PHP IDE vendor and are interested in PHPUnit support: contact me, I'll help where I can. Thank you!

Update: I learned about the Eclipse PHP Integrated Development Environment, an open-source project under the Eclipse Tools Project proposed by Zend and IBM. Andi Gutmans assured me that the new, Eclipse-based version of the Zend Studio will support PHPUnit.

Update: Steven Balthazor, the author of the SimpleTest integration for PHPEclipse, started to work on support for PHPUnit in PHPEclipse.

Today I came across an article by Adrian Colyer on how he has configured his Eclipse environment and I thought that it might be a good time to look again at PHPEclipse.

The first advice that Adrian gives is that one should use a larger fontsize (he recommends 14 points bold) for code editing. This is not only better for the eyes but also motivates the programmer to write smaller methods (as he wants to see the entire method body on the screen). And we all know that small methods are something to strive for.

I have been using a larger font (Bitstream Vera Sans Mono at 14 points) for coding for a while and can definitely agree with Adrian's points here.



As I am not a regular Eclipse user (at least not yet), I was positively surprised by Adrian's tips on arranging views using the Fast View feature. This allows for easy access to views like the Navigator View (above) and the Outline View (below) while preventing clutter during editing.



My first impression is that PHPEclipse offers good support for PHP code editing (Syntax Highlighting, Syntax Checking, Class Browsing). One thing that I still have to figure out is how the Code Completion works as I am not sure what to make of the results I got during my first tests.

Update: Adrian Colyer published his tips for using Eclipse effectively on his blog.