Month: March 2018

atoum – modern, simple and intuitive PHP unit testing framework

With all the hype around the quality assurance and testing tools for PHP, I wonder how did I miss atoum.  Atoum is a modern, simple and intuitive unit testing framework for PHP.  From a quick look around, it seems to be a lot simpler than PHPUnit and I definitely need to find some time to give it a go.

Also, here’s a blog post that describes how Automattic moved from PHPUnit to atoum, which makes a lot of sense (you know what I’m talking about if you ever tried to write PHPUnit tests for WordPress projects).

Threadable – a PHP library for parallel execution

Threadable is a PHP library that helps with building applications that need to run multiple threads in parallel.  It relies on posix and pcntl PHP extensions and does all the heavy lifting of process control.  I find this very useful, as not many PHP developers are familiar with process management.

SystemDaemon – Simple base for system daemons in PHP

SystemDaemon is a library that helps with writing system daemons and services in PHP.  PHP is not my personal favorite language for such tasks, but there is often a need, despite the preference.  Some examples are:

  • scheduled tasks (cron jobs) that need to execute more often than once per minute
  • message queue workers
  • real-time synchronization scripts

 

Kitab – documentation rendering and testing tool for PHP

Kitab is a handy tool for PHP developers that helps with two things:

  1. Render static HTML (with added search) from the doc-blocks in source code.
  2. Unit test the examples that are in the doc-blocks.

There are a number of tools that do the first one (phpDocumentor, Doxygen, Sami, etc).  However I don’t remember seeing anything that accomplishes the second task.