I recently have started looking into making myself a PHP Zend Certified Engineer and after doing a bit of research I found that the standard PHP string and array functions appear to be a large part of the exam material. So as a starting point (and for future revision) I decided it might be a good idea to create a revision sheet for those functions.

The DateTime classes in PHP have been available since version 5.2, but I have largely ignored them until recently. This was partly due to the fact that I was working in PHP 5.1 environments a lot (don't ask) but mostly because I was just used to using the standard date functions that have always been a part of PHP (well, since version 4). I wanted to explain why I will be using the new DateTime classes more from now on and why you shouldn't be hesitant to use them.

I have started to use virtual machines to develop sites rather than installing a local web server. This allows me to replicate the exact setup of the server I will be deploying to with ease. For each virtual machine I set up a shared folder which allows me to store the files locally whilst being able to run the code on the virtual machine. One thing I missed was the ability to use xdebug to debug the sites through Netbeans, so I set about trying to set up the virtual hosts to allow me to use xdebug remotely.

I have talked before about running Selenium tests in PHPUnit but I have only recently come to properly automate things. Getting a Selenium server to start and stop in a script is relatively easy and can be done in a simple script. My original script for running a directory of PHPUnit tests was as follows.

I was at a meeting of the Manchester Web Performance Group the other day where Tom Taylor gave a talk about some of the performance testing tool he uses at Laterooms.com. He used a ruby script to set up some preferences in Firefox which then ran Selenium to open some web pages and test them with YSlow. The results of the YSlow inspection are then sent to a Show Slow server where the results can be graphed over time.