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PHPUnit, Selenium… Sebastian’s workshops in Australia

Sebastian Bergmann’s slides of his presentation at OSCON this week. Quality Assurance in PHP Projects is a workshop by Sebastian (author of PHPUnit) in Melbourne (4-6 August) and Brisbane (11-12,14 August), on my invitation. This was triggered by meeting up with him earlier this year at the MySQL Conf in Santa Clara, and a discussion I had a month or so later with Jonathan Oxer of IVT.

I’ve been promoting various aspects of development process improvements through the keynote selection at OSDC 2007, the distributed revision control talk at the combined MySQL/PHP user groups in Brisbane by Ian Clatworthy (Canonical/Bazaar), and of course test-driven development for PHP is another key aspect. PHP is pupular (essentially it runs Web 2.0) but so easy that coders can get very slack. On a larger project, this can become disastrous. I don’t believe that PHP is fundamentally bad; given the right development environment, it’s fine. It’s just that what’s regarded as standard in the Java and Ruby/Rails world, has been nonexistent, hard to use, or optional in the PHP realm.

Anyway, both workshops are almost full now, just one or two places still available. No this is not marketing blah to just make you think it’s popular 😉 If I say almost full, I do mean just that. I gave Jonathan a place for the Melbourne workshop, as it’s his birthday coming up this Saturday (Unfortunately I can’t make it to the party next week). Jonathan is a special friend to me and Open Query as we bounce around ideas and exchange interesting books. IVT also happened to be Open Query’s first customer.

Speaking of gifts, consider donating something for little Ivan Nikitin’s operation: http://www.mysql.com/about/help-ivan.html. This is not another random sad chainletter, this is a real small smurf, son of a MySQL support engineer. Ivan and his parents have now already arrived in Germany for the tests and procedures that Ivan needs, however additional financial help is still very important.

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