PHP Vikinger 2008 Wrap-up
PHP Vikinger is over again. With about 35 attendees, I would think it was a great success. After opening the event, we figured out which topics people were interested in. After voting for the topics, we came up with a nice couple of topics. First we had a little discussion on QA and Testing, which Thomas Nuninger moderated. I include my (raw) notes from this:
Selenium takes a long time to run tests, so Thomas only uses it for front end only, whereas phpunit is used for as much as possible backend code. Selenium apparently has some functionality for parallelising ( selenium grid ), but there are some issues as well as you can not tell it to run specific tests parallel. WebDriver does exactly the same, except for running it in the same browser. But it's going away from actually using a real browser... which sorta defeats the point of Selenium. Thomas also mentions that sometimes a fixed value as recorded by the IDE is not good... but you can "fix" that yourself in the PHPUnit tests that Selenium can export. The IDE is getting better BTW. CruiseControl , phpUnderControl , phing (phing is not gnu make) - a port of Ant .
After this, we had a discussion about the deployment of web applications, where we discussed some different approaches such as "svn check-out", but also tools for doing so such as Capistrano .
Sebastian then explained a little bit about the PHP Object Model . We also tried to figure out a strange profiling issue in one of Zoë Slattery's applications with Xdebug , but we could not manage to figure out what it was just yet. The last talk before lunch was from Kore Nordmann about CouchDb .
After the pizza lunch provided by Klosterøya, we continued with presentations on Project Zero , by Ant Philips of IBM; the new lexer in PHP by Scott MacVicar and a talk by Sebastian Bergmann on the eZ Components' Workflow component. The last talk of the day was by Tobias Schlitt on database abstraction with eZ Components .
I will put the slides online at the PHP Vikinger website once I receive all of them.
Comments
Selenium Grid is actually for executing tests parallel, it just helps you to do so. So all the logic which test to run where has be on the test driver (easy to do with TestNG, hard to do with JUnit, impossible to do with PHPUnit [see http://www.phpunit.de/ticket/151], a hackish way to do that is to use bash forking separate PHPUnit processes).
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