{
    "href": "/post/2007/11/30/what-does-this-say-about-unit-testing-in-php-land/",
    "relId": "2007/11/30/what-does-this-say-about-unit-testing-in-php-land",
    "title": "What Does This Say About Unit-Testing in PHP Land?",
    "author": "pmjones",
    "markup": "html",
    "tags": [
        {
            "href": "/tag/php/",
            "relId": "php",
            "title": "PHP",
            "author": null,
            "created": null,
            "updated": [],
            "markup": "markdown"
        }
    ],
    "created": "2007-11-30 16:49:51 UTC",
    "updated": [
        "2007-11-30 16:49:51 UTC"
    ],
    "html": "<p>Without having done actual research, and depending on my personal experience alone, I would assert that in PHP userland ...</p>\n<ul>\n<li>There are maybe 20 or more general-purpose CMSes.</li>\n<li>There are perhaps 50 or more public frameworks (of varying quality and approach).</li>\n<li>There are easily 100 or more templating libraries (even if most of them can be grouped under 4 or 5 approaches).</li>\n<li>There appear to be only 5 unit-test systems:  PhpUnit, SimpleTest, Solar_Test, PHPT, and Lime.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>Dispute the specific numbers all you like; they're not the point.  The point is that CMSes, frameworks, template systems, etc. seem to be a very common artifact among PHP developers, but writing (and then publishing) unit-test systems does not seem anywhere near as common an obsession.</p>\n<p>What does this say, if anything, about the attention given to unit-testing among PHP developers?</p>\n<p>Note that this is an *off-the-cuff opinion* and a *request for comment*, and nothing else.  (Some folks get testy about testing; please remember to be nice while commenting.  ;-)</p>\n<p><strong>Update:</strong> And there are only 3 or 4 documentation systems:  PhpDocumentor, Doxygen, and Solar_Docs, along with the various combinations of DocBook tools that Zend, PEAR, and PHP are using.  I wonder how that enters into it, if at all.</p>\n"
}