“All code should be tested in my opinion – it helps produce quality code and give you the confidence the code is working in the way you expect”
So writing more javascript has meant I want to test that too I quickly discovered QUnit – a very simple library developed by the creator of jQuery John Resig. Although not the only tool I looked at this seemed to satisfy my requirements at the time. I need to check out Jasmine as I have heard that is good too. But this was simple and quick to adopt and had an easily understood syntax.
So here is a quick code example, taken directly from an application I put together – check to make sure the marker array is emptied of markers when the appropriate function is called.
{code}
test(“remove markers”,function(){
kepn_map.removeMarkers();
ok(kepn_map.markers.length==0); <— assertion
})
{code}
It has some basic yet powerful assertions (OK,equal being the most commonly used), ability to run tests asynchronously and is easy to set up so I thought i would share it. I know I will be using this more often,and looking into other tools for the same.

OK I learnt the hard way – after upgrading my phpunit to 3.6 so I could give a talk at ILinkoln I soon discovered that this made my Zend tests hang – particularly controller tests. Didumms I hear you say just downgrade. But it is not just downgrade so I thought I would write it up here for anyone else needing to downgrade from PHPunit 3.6

You need to determine which aspects you have installed – then Unistall them

sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/DbUnit
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHP_CodeCoverage
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/File_Iterator
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/Text_Template
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHP_Timer
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit_MockObject
sudo pear uninstall phpunit/PHPUnit_Selenium
sudo pear uninstall pear.symfony-project.com/YAML


Then you need to specifically install the versions you require for the phpunti version you are reverting to
I chose 3.5.15 – even through Zend on officailly support 3.4.x I have been happily running with this.

You need to install the specific versions of each dependency, in an exact order depending on what you, then install PHPUnit-3.5.15 last.
But how do you install a previous persion of a dependency and phpunit easy

Next install these specific versions of each dependency, in this order, installing PHPUnit-3.5.15 last.

sudo pear install -
e.g
sudo pear install phpunit/PHPUnit-3.5.15


Hope that helps someone else not waste a hour.

I recently attended PHPNW conference again (I have been to all but one since it started), this has become another one of my annual geek pilgramages and thought I would drop a few notes down, *Disclaimer: I was a volunteer helper, which means I don’t have anything to do with the organisation, but sometimes the session I am in is not one I would have immediately chosen. Also I did not get chance to go to the un-conferance part, shame that. Please note these individual reviews are marked up with hReview and are therefore freely and easily available for you to share if you so wish.

In summary day 1 was excellent and after the free food and beer that followed the talks, spurned many interesting conversations with some talented phpists.

I flit around languages, PHP, Ruby, Java so I often miss a few things as they come onto the radar, at PHPNW11 I learnt about a new technology to try as part of my testing (thanks to Ben Waine) So I am going to run a few posts documenting this while I try it out.

This PHP North West Conference is happening again this year on October 7th through 9th in Manchester, UK. I have attended 3 PHPNW conferences and they have all been brilliant in every way. Jeremy Coates ( @phpcodemonkey) certainly has and continues to produce a great event. The conference this year will be split over two days on the 8th and 9th of October with 3 full tracks on the Saturday and 2 tracks on the Sunday. There will also be tutorials this year.
If you are into PHP I urge you to go to this event. So yet again I have purchased the blind bird ticket which went on sale yesterday.

I more than often nowadays split my time between Java and PHP and try to adopt the best practices I know, in both areas.
This typically starts with ensuring I can carry out

• Test Driven Development
• Continuous Integration

I have just started to use a framework in Java and have opted for the Spring Framework.
Recently whilst working on a Spring Framework project – I was happily writing Integration tests and testing within the IDE and being new to the framework feeling very happy with my progress. However when I came to committing the code and running it through our Bamboo CI engine I was getting tests failing. (That didn’t fail in the IDE?)
The report showed

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Failed to load ApplicationContext

Turns out the clean I was performing (as you would ) before tests in Maven was causing an issue. So I did a bit of digging and trying to resolve.

So this is here as a reminder and help for other people with the same issue.

You need to ensure you load your files from the classpath.

My code :

@ContextConfiguration  (locations = "classpath:/FormControllerTestCase-context.xml")
/* Note that if no file is specified to @ContextConfiguration, it is derived as -context.xml, */

@RunWith(SpringJUnit4ClassRunner.class)
public class FormControllerTestCase  {

    private FormController controller;

    @Before
    public void setup()
    {

         controller = new FormController();

    }

    @Test
    public void testIndexViewShownOnConstruction()
    {

And the key to it all was ensuring the context files and any associated property files were stored in /src/test/resources/

This is the default location Maven pulls from apparently.

I was saddened when geocities closed and yet again I am saddened by the news of the latest BBC cuts which will remove lots of web real estate.
About half of the 400 stand-alone websites and webpages will close. Among the sites facing the axe are the youth-orientated BBC Switch, Video Nation and a number of forums, blogs and message boards, including the 606 community football site.

And these are digital resources containing our memories , for example literally the BBC asked the public to contribute their memories of World War Two to a website between June 2003 and January 2006…” and five years later someone has decided to bin them. The BBC’s decision to actively delete old content (rather than simply allowing it to take up some space on a server) I think is the wrong decision and it made me think what we should do with web content past it expiration date (if there is such a thing) or more likely no longer commercially / economically viable?

As a programmer I often question the design paradigm “Convention over configuration” many developers I am sure do the same thing.
I really like writing code and the interesting part is solving the problems and acknowledge some of it is not interesting.

More and more I find myself coding by convention as I rely on framework code.

I do this a lot in Java, largely because of the lack of underlying knowledge, I still have to think quite a lot about the basics, but with PHP this is different, so I thought I would write down my thoughts on the whole thing, so next time I question should I do this I might look back and take my own advice.

I have created a lot of stuff and earned my badges creating a lot of the standard design patterns from scratch.
So once you have solved the basic problem should I revert to some ready made solution, that is likely to have done it better than I had anyway.

If I need to build a quite large complex system or even one that I know is going to grow quite significantly. There are a number of advantages to using a framework, for the reason I can use other well tested code to achieve large proportions of the functionality,but largely to me code organisation and separation of concerns are the big pluses.

As I write a lot of stuff for internal use and most of the stuff is going to integrate with other systems I seem to have a knack of finding the quirks that make that hard work using the framework code, on both sides, there is a enough to do anyway.

So if I am writing a system should I use a framework — YES

If I am writing a small script forget it – even though I am tempted.

As to which, well that depends on the current trends and functionality you need.