Johannes Schlüter

Two years ago at some conference I had a conversation with Sebastian about the need for a way to overload the new operator in PHP so, probably, bad designed code can be tested more easily by replacing specific classes with mocks. On the train ride home -- I like coding on a train without the disturbing Internet -- I came up with a proof-of-concept extension for PHP and sent it to Sebastian.

Then we more or less forgot about it or did other things until a few days ago where both, Sebastian and I, independently remembered it. Sebastian then pushed the code as part of a new test_helpers extension with some documentation to github and I fixed some bugs in it. The aim of the extension is to collect functionality which might be beneficial for phpUnit and other test scenarios but which should never reach a production environment.

Currently only the new overloading is part of this extension. A simple example might look like this:

<?php
class Foo {}
class Bar {}

function callback($className) {
    if ($className == 'Foo') {
        $className = 'Bar';
    }

    return $className;
}

var_dump(get_class(new Foo));

set_new_overload('callback');
var_dump(get_class(new Foo));
?>

Which will print

string(3) "Foo"
string(3) "Bar"

Today Sebastian was brave and released it as 1.0.0 on phpUnit's PEAR channel. Please refer to the README for further information.

The PHP TestFest was mentioned on Planet PHP multiple times before, so let's make it one more: Pierre and me are currently working on organizing a TestFest event at Munich. So we are looking for feedback from folks somewhere in the Munich area (or even all of southern Germany) so we know how many people to expect and then set a date. The requirement is mainly having experience with PHP. Being able to read C code might help here and there but is no requirement - it's way more important to be interested in PHP. So if you're interested in meeting core devs and participating in the TestFest and possibly win a few nice prizes please take a look at the TestFest page to get more information and leave a note to me at johannes on php.net so I can do my planning.

Since a few hours we're having, thanks to Edin, Windows snapshots for the upcoming PHP 5.3 release. In combination with the latest sources from CVS everybody should be able to test the current state.

There are quite a few new features already committed to the CVS tree, some of them are documented in the NEWS file and READMEs in CVS, most of them have been commented on Planet PHP so I suggest searching there for more information and keep this list short:

• Namespaces: A way to help you organizing your code.
• Late Static Binding: Gives you the class name used when calling a static method.
• Dynamic static calls: $c = "classname"; $c::someMetod();
• Improved ini-handling: .htaccess file like per-directory configuration and much more
• __callStatic magic method: similar to __call but for static calls
• mysqlnd: a replacement for libmysql for better PHP-MySQL-Integration
• getopt() on any platform (inclding windows)
• ...

As you can see there's lots of stuff which needs testing! The earlier bugs are found the earlier they can be fixed! In case you ever wondered how you could give back something to PHP (which you certainly should do) you might take a look at our test coverage reports to see which areas of PHP need more testing and provide additional tests. (See qa.php.net and Marcus's slides for an introduction to test writing) Having more tests is important for us - and you don't have to know much about PHP internals to write proper tests (sometimes it's even better to write black-box tests...)

But well, there's not only PHP 5.3: If you're interested in unicode you should certainly take a look at PHP 6 and if you're running older systems you should consider upgrading to the latest 5.2 release instead of waiting for PHP 5.3 - the stable release is not expected within this year and many things there can change till it's released.

And as a final note: Test the snaps as often as you can - generic tests can never cover all use-cases and - as said above - fixing regressions is harder after a release than during development. (And be warned: We won't take any complaints from people not testing in time)

Ilia recently published the probably final release candidate of the current stable tree: PHP 5.2.4RC2. The stable release can be expected soon. This release fixes quite some bugs from older versions and does a few minor adjustments. Please test the RC release so unexpected regressions can be detected and fixed before it's marked stable. If regressions and other problems aren't detected now it will take a few months till the next version will be released, so do your best to make sure it's worth being called stable! Please file found issues, after checking for other reports and the documentation, into the bug tracker. The recent trend to report bugs using blogs isn't working well!

In other news one could read that there were also some major improvements in the development of PHP 6 made: Next to all that Unicode related work which was made over the last months PHP got, due to Andrey, mysqlnd as PHP-optimized replacement for libmysql and, thanks to Dmitry's work, namespace support. So this weekend might be the perfect time for sending you're family visting other parts of the family, letting them sweat on some beach or having fun at some theme park - then you can sit down, relax, and, after testing PHP 5.2.4RC2, give that new stuff in PHP 6 a test.

For getting started with PHP 6, which you can get, as you're hopefully used to, from the snaps site, you should first read Andrei's slides about Unicode and PHP 6. The most important Unicde+PHP facts are also collected inside a README file. For namespaces there's, again, a README file, David Coallier has written a nice summary and Stanislav wrote a short FAQ. If you are curious what mysqlng is: simply read Ulf's blog postings or Andrey's slides.