Book Image

Expert PHP 5 Tools

By : Dirk Merkel
Book Image

Expert PHP 5 Tools

By: Dirk Merkel

Overview of this book

Even if you find writing PHP code easy, writing code that is efficient and easy to maintain and reuse is not so straightforward. Self-taught PHP developers and programmers transitioning from other languages often lack the knowledge to work with PHP on an enterprise level. They need to take their PHP development skills to that level by learning the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient code.This book will enable you to take your PHP development skills to an enterprise level by teaching you the skills and tools necessary to write maintainable and efficient code. You will learn how to perform activities such as unit testing, enforcing coding standards, automating deployment, and interactive debugging using tools created for PHP developers – all the information in one place. Your code will be more maintainable, efficient, and self-documented.From the design phase to actually deploying the application, you will learn concepts and apply them using the best-of-breed tools available in PHP.Experienced developers looking for expertise in PHP development will learn how to follow best practices within the world of PHP. The book contains many well-documented code samples and recipes that can be used as a starting point for producing quality code.Specifically, you will learn to design an application with UML, code it in Eclipse with PDT, document it with phpDocumentor, debug it interactively with Xdebug, test it by writing PHPUnit tests, manage source code in Subversion, speed up development and increase stability by using Zend Framework, pull everything together using continuous integration, and deploy the application automatically with Phing – all in one book. The author's experience in PHP development enables him to share insights on using enterprise tools, in a clear and friendly way.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Expert PHP 5 Tools
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Testing methods


The following sections briefly look at how to approach testing in general. The basic question is whether it is best to focus on how the code is supposed to behave or whether the tester should be aware of what the code is actually doing. That is to say, should you test the code from the outside with the actual implementation hidden or should you be aware of how the programmer implemented the required functionality? As we will see, both approaches have their pros and cons and in the end it is possible for you to choose your own combination, as the two sides are not mutually exclusive.

It might not be obvious at first, but considering the general approach first will help us in understanding how others might be testing our code. It also helps us when we get into the heart of this chapter and start writing unit tests.

Black box

Black box testing treats the code that is being tested as a complete unknown. The tester only needs to know how the code is supposed to behave, not how...