PHPUnit

This past week, the latest PHP RFC, Deprecate Dynamic Properties, passed 2:1. It just barely met the 2/3 vote threshold for passing, which of course can and has been spun in various pro-and-con ways. The RFC covers the change itself fairly well so I won't go into detail about it here.

The main argument people had against it was that it involves triggering deprecation warnings. Which... is kind of the point. That's kind of all it does.

This is not the first time that debate has come up, but it's been coming up more frequently and we, as PHP, need to improve the answer.

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In my last post, we talked about PHPUnit's data providers, and how to leverage them to write more maintainable tests. Today, I want to talk about two more test-writing techniques that I've found to be very helpful.

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Most PHP developers are familiar with PHPUnit these days. It is the most widely used testing framework for PHP by a wide margin (although others do exist). One of its more under-utilized features, though is data providers.

Data providers are a PHPUnit feature (and many testing frameworks have an equivalent) that lets you run a single test method multiple times but with different data. Often it's presented as a way to save typing, but I find it is also a useful architectural tool, too. And there are ways to use them that are even nicer than what most people tend to do.

Continue reading this post on PeakD.