Phly, boy, phly
the weblog and site of Matthew Weier O'Phinney

I've been playing with PHPUnit a lot of late, particularly with framework development. One thing that's always hard to determine is how well your code is exercised -- basically, how much of the code is tested in the unit tests?

In PHPUnit 3, you can now generate code coverage reports using XDebug, and the usage is very simple:

matthew@localhost:~/dev/zend/framework-svn/tests$ phpunit --report ~/tmp/report AllTests

The above command creates a coverage report directory 'report' under my tmp directory. You can then browse through the reports in a web browser and visually see which lines of code were executed during tests, and which were not, as well as a synopsis showing the percentage of coverage for any given file or directory -- useful stuff indeed!

So, what's the problem? Getting XDebug running.

The executive summary:

• Enable the extension using zend_extension = /full/path/to/xdebug.so, not as extension = xdebug.so, in your php.ini
• Use the setting xdebug.default_enable = Off in your php.ini.
• If compiling using pecl or pear, make sure it compiles against the correct PHP; if not, hand compile it using:

  $ /path/to/phpize
  $ ./configure --with-php-config=/path/to/php-config
  $ make
  $ make install
  

For the detailed narrative, read on.

Several months ago, Andi asked me to take the role of lead developer on a refactoring of the Zend Framework MVC components. I agreed, though somewhat reluctantly; I already maintain another MVC library, and wasn't sure how well I could fill the shoes of people like my friends Mike, who had done the initial development on the controller classes, and Paul, who provided Zend_View.

The experience has been incredibly rewarding, however, and I've had the chance to pick the brains of and work with some top-notch developers in the process. In the next week or so, we'll be releasing version 0.6.0 of the framework, and it will include much of my work in the MVC components as part of the core distribution. A big thanks to all those who have contributed opinions, design help, code, tests, and documentation; another thank you goes to Andi for trusting and supporting me in this endeavor.

So, what are the changes? Read on to find out...