TYPO3

I was discussing recently with a TYPO3 colleague about performance, specifically caching. Both he and I are working on systems that may involve hundreds or thousands of objects that need to be cached for later use. The objects themselves are fairly small, but there's a large number of them. The data format is only internal, so we don't need anything standardized or parsable by outside systems.

PHP actually has two options for this use case: serialize()/unserialize() and var_export()/require(). But which is better?

Quick, to the benchmark mobile! The results I found were not at all what I expected.

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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.

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