Johannes Schlüter

Just a quick heads-up: After quite some time from RC1 PHP 5.3.1RC2 has finally been packaged and released. The PHP bug tracker is welcoming reports about issues, I also welcome positive feedback.

Downloads:

• Source:
  http://downloads.php.net/johannes/php-5.3.1RC2.tar.bz2
  http://downloads.php.net/johannes/php-5.3.1RC2.tar.gz
• Windows binaries:
  http://windows.php.net/qa/

(This release candidate is not meant to be used in production systems, wait for the final release for that but please test this version)

It was a long run and I'm sure it felt like an eternity for many - for me it certainly did. PHP 5.3 was branched of over two years ago and finally is ready to be called 5.3.0.

The php.net website and many other blogs discuss the features - from often loved closures, to well discussed namespaces to the sometimes hated goto - so I think I don't have to this here but instead can focus on that what really matters:

• Thanks to all the developers - Without them no new features would be there.
• Thanks to the documentation team - Without them one would have to decipher the NEWS file and guess what exactly is meant.
• Thanks to all participants during the Testfest! - During the Testfest we received many good tests for our regression test suite. Many of these tests represent what people do, not what developers think they should do which is important to reduce the risk of regressions. I hope people don't stop sending tests!
• Thanks to all the testers who reported bugs, and to the ones who reported that their applications worked without issues! - Regression tests are important but many possible issues can only be found in real life scenarios with real applications.
• Thanks to the whole community to make pressure on the developers to finally get it out as everybody is waiting for the new features.
• And last, but certainly not least: Thanks to Lukas! - Handling developers who are passionate for their work can be tough. Lukas made sure that the developers focus on what really matters and really helped me with all the work needed

So with that: In case you didn't do already: Browse over to php.net and grab your copy, it's for free!

If you want to celebrate the release and are close to Munich: We're planing a PHP Release Party on July 17th, details on that will follow.

One of the things I do quite often is running PHP's regression test suite which is using a custom test format called .phpt. The PHP source distribution, and CVS checkouts, include a nice script for running them called run-tests.php.

run-tests.php gives a summary of failed tests in the end. As a developer I'm now interested for the reasons for the failures. The test system therefore produces a bunch of files, a file containing the expected output, one containing the actual output and a diff between these as relevant files. The problem there is that the diff, for being portable, is using a quite simple machnism which only shows the lines which differ without any context. This makes it quite hard to read. Therefore I usually diff the .exp and .out files myself for doing that I have a few simple shell scripts which I call with the test name and then get a proper diff.

Lately I've changed my way of working and use vim less, I still use it, but I use NetBeans as an IDE more and more. So I thought a bit about that test issue and searched my brain for my Java skills and started playing around to see whether I manage to write a NetBeans plugin which can run the tests and report the results in a usable way. Over the time it looked quite promising, so I registered a launchpad project and imported the code to a repository there. Now I think I've reached a true milestone which should basically work for interested folks. And released a version 0.6.0.

The module registers an menu entry and a toolbar icon to start a wizard. This wizard asks you for the PHP binaries to use and test directory to run. It will then run the tests and open a window with the results of each test. By double clicking or using a context menu you can then get the actual test code and a diff. If you have PHP support installed in NetBeans the code will also be highlighted.

There are still a few issues most importantly you need a special version of run-tests.php, which is bundled, and not all things, like redirect tests, are supported. There are certainly other issues, but the aim is mostly to help me. If you're interested feel free to report a bug and maybe I look into it. If you're brave you can also fetch the code and start hacking it - but keep in mind I'm no Java developer and had no idea what I'm aiming at and how to write NetBeans modules when I started, you can see that in the code

This code requires Java 6 (since I make use of SwingWorker) and I didn't test older NetBeans versions than 6.5 since that version has proper PHP support and there's little sense in having older versions installed.

P.S. The screenshot is a bit faked: The inner windows don't appear exactly like that, yet, but that's the aim and you can easily use Drag'n'Drop inside the IDE to arrange them till I found out how to that from within the code.