PHP Testing

I have successfully gotten Simple Test to test itself in Apache-Test. It wasn't that hard really. I have added very basic Apache-Test support by just subclassing the SimpleReporter class in SimpleTest. The new class name is TAPReporter. It basically just allows a test to create TAP compliant (see this post) output which is then read by Apache-Test. There are a few things which in my opinion could be changed in SimpleTest in order to make TAP complancy much better and it would actually improve some of the functionality of SimpleTest apart from Apache-Test. I am somewhat hesitant to make those changes right now however as the code is not mine and really should be discussed with the creator of SimpleTest. (Which I do plan on doing.) I will outline later in this articles the changes I think would be useful. For now I would just like to review what I did do and how to run the tests.

As some of you know I am currently working on a project to allow Simple Test to be Apache-Test compliant. The process to take in doing so is to enable Simple Test to produce TAP compliant output. To do so obviously requires a healthy knowledge of the different aspects of the TAP protocol. The best way for me to get a grasp of something is of course to write about it. I gleaned pretty much all of this information from CPAN's TAP format documentation.