PHPUnit is a member of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and provides both a framework that makes the writing of tests easy as well as the functionality to easily run the tests and analyse their results. In a new post on his blog, Sebastian Bergmann writes, " After more than six months of development, I have released PHPUnit 3.1.0 today. Let's take a look at what this release has to offer:

* Improvements to Mock Objects include the ability to mock classes and methods that do not exist as well as mocking static methods. And mocked methods can raise exceptions now.
* PHPUnit's Selenium RC extension no longer uses the Testing_Selenium PEAR package but its own implementation of the Selenium RC client/server protocol. Among other benefits, this allows for the collection of code coverage data for Selenium tests.
* PHPUnit can now write test result and code coverage data to a test database. Several ideas for future features depend on this data.
* New template methods, PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase::sharedAssertions(), PHPUnit_Framework_TestSuite::setUp(), PHPUnit_Framework_TestSuite::tearDown(), and PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase::defaultAssertions(), ease the development of test cases.
* PHPUnit_Framework_TestCase::assertEquals() can now operate on DOMDocument objects.
* And lots of smaller improvements all over the place.


After this release, the focus of development will now be on PHPUnit 4.