I’m glad to announce the new release of the limb/tests_runner package which reached 0.8.7-beta version! This package ships with limb_unit - a SimpleTest tests “swiss army knife” console based runner. If you’d like to know more about limb_unit utility I would highly recommend reading its documentation since it provides quite unique features like nested fixtures, code coverage and so on(documentation it’s actual for 0.8.5-beta as of this writing, but that’s ok).

This release introduces some unique filtering features which can be quite useful for large sets of tests. Now it’s possible to use filters for the following entities:

• test classes
• test classes’ methods
• test classes’ PHPDoc @group annotation tags

In the rest of this post I’ll describe these new features in detail.
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After having used multiple template engines for the last 5 years I’m a strong believer that the best template engine is…PHP itself We just need some tools to make the usage of raw PHP in templates more friendly and readable.

I have used the forked version of WACT template engine for about 3 years and finally come to the conclusion that its runtime part is way too complicated and non obvious at times. However I do very like the idea of compile time tree of components which generate PHP code. At the same time I just wanted to simplify WACT and make the process of adding new tags much more straight-forward.

That’s why I have hacked up the initial implementation of {{macro}}. To be short, the main idea behind {{macro}} is to use C/C++ alike(but way more sophisticated) macro tags to simplify usage of raw PHP in templates.

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If you have ever tried to setup the Continuous Integration process using one of the well known ‘classic’ tools like CruiseControl you might have been wondering if there’s a simpler and quicker way. I have been wondering too, thus meet Buildman

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In my previous nginx related post I promised to show a couple of utility scripts we use to simplify managing of multiple virtual hosts both under Apache and nginx. Well, here they come

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I was quite inspired on having heard that the late static binding(LSB) patch will make it into PHP-5.3. In short, it should allow to know the name of a class which invoked the parent’s static class method.

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If you’re running a company mainly occupied with development of lots of web sites ranging from tiny promo sites to large portals you most probably should face deployment headaches some day.

How do folks usually deploy their remote applications? Some use manual deployment via FTP, others prefer using rsync or unison, some brave souls deploy simply by updating the project’s Subversion working copy on the remote server, Rails fans usually stick with Capistrano, some smart fellows are said to be using complicated cfengine, etc.

At my company we were not happy with any mentioned above methods of remote project deployment due to either lack of functionality or unnecessary complexity. We simply needed a tool which could use non-technical personnel: managers, web-designers, etc. That’s why we hacked our own simple utility - meet Syncman

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