PHPUnit 4.0 Released

Good question. This won't happen. You know why? Whether a test fails, or succeeds, the PHP request is over.

What happened to all those people proud of PHP's principles? "Shared nothing", remember? Why on earth would your tests share resources and state? This is not Java. It's PHP.

Look at PHP's own tests: PHPT files. They're simple files containing code to setup a test, and the result of a test.

How tests run, well, in a nutshell:

foreach (glob('/tests/*' as $test)) exec('php ' . $test);

Then you check the logs. You can have your little pretty log formatted if you want, but it's not that important:

- If there's stuff in the log, your test failed, you go check why.

- If there's no stuff in the log, you're good to go.

It can catch output, exceptions, even fatal errors. Can PHPUnit catch fatal errors? You need to use its "process isolation features", which is just reinventing the wheel by doing... what I just did in that one-liner above. Well I did it! Process isolation! And I didn't need PHPUnit to do it.

A lot of those "modern PHP" libraries are basically a masochistic exercise in copying designs that make sense in Java into PHP where they make no sense.

PHPT style tests wouldn't make sense in Java. And Java style Unit test frameworks make no sense in PHP.

However all those blindly supporting this, can please continue to waste their time, for the benefit of making sure they're buzzword compliant & in sync with groupthink.

"I write my mocks and fixtures in PHPUnit. Oh yeah it has all the latest assertions, like you can assert XML using CSS selectors". I can almost hear the collective taps on my back just saying this out loud.

Your last point there has been how I've tackled it. My test methods/classes are all well named and broken up into particular chunks so that even if the test failed message isn't very useful, the context it failed in answers it 90% of the time :)

> Look at PHP's own tests: PHPT files. They're simple files containing code to setup a test, and the result of a test.

> How tests run, well, in a nutshell:

> foreach (glob('/tests/*' as $test)) exec('php ' . $test);

This fails your own litmus test. The PHPT runner that ships with PHP is actually thousands of lines long: https://github.com/php/php-src/blob/7b7d2952a606fba6a5e21998...

Keep in mind that PHPT files have to be parsed in userland. The runner has to pull out the --TEST-- section from each file, write it to a temp file and then execute the temp file in a separate PHP process. It's actually an incredibly slow way to test your code. I have test suites where thousands of PHPUnit tests execute an order of magnitude faster than dozens of PHPT files.

> "Oh yeah it has all the latest assertions, like you can assert XML using CSS selectors".

The value of PHPUnit isn't really the assertions. It's true that most of the assertions can be replaced with a single line of code. The main exception is assertEquals which requires some special consideration for recursive objects, canonicalization, floating points, etc.

The biggest selling point for my team is the ecosystem. PHPUnit integrates with a number of IDEs, continuous integration platforms, ticketing systems, profiling tools, code coverage tools, code quality tools, etc.