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

Summary


We started this chapter with an overview of different types of testing. Hopefully, this background knowledge will help you to better relate to the various people that have a stake in the software development process. Different motivations result in different types of testing. A functional expert cares whether the system produces the correct result, but may care little about the details of the implementation on a code level. It's not his job.

Our job as developers, however, is closely tied to the lowest level of testing, namely unit testing. With the help of the PHPUnit framework, we learned how to quickly construct simple tests, organize them, and execute them. We even covered advanced topics such as test-driven development and code coverage analysis.

Paired with a little discipline, PHPUnit is sure to make it easier to catch bugs early in the development process when it is still comparatively cheap to fix them. I challenge you to write the first line of code on your next project for...