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Analyzed about 16 hours ago. based on code collected 3 days ago.
Community Rating
4.15789
   

Average Rating:   4.2/5.0
Number of Ratings:   19
Number of Reviews:   1

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Most Helpful Reviews

Peter Bex says:
Feels like an abandoned project  
2.0
   
written over 13 years ago

Simpletest used to be a pretty decent test framework, but unfortunately its maintainer has very little time to spend on it. Even though there is still work being done on the subversion tree and he actively helps people on the mailinglist, the last official and stable release is from 2008. This release still has some PHP4-isms in it (especially regarding the way it uses objects and pass-by-reference), and if you enable strict warnings, PHP bombards you with warnings.

The documentation isn't great with several completely different-looking static html websites providing information about it, but you can get the information you need from it. I think newer documentation is concentrated in the PHPDocumenter-generated API docs (which is a mess all in itself), which PHPUnit also uses for their main documentation.

The API is very similar to PHPUnit too, as both were inspired by the xUnit type of test frameworks. However, PHPUnit has a much more active development team, has a much more thorough documentation and, as far as I've been able to determine, is used by more projects. Drupal is a notable exception as it has embraced Simpletest in their previous release, but they ripped out all that code in favor of their own implementation (which they confusingly also call SimpleTest...)

Both SimpleTest and PHPUnit consist of a tangled web of classes which are quite hard to understand unless you are willing to dive deep into the bowels of the system, but I guess that's just typical for xUnit type frameworks. It came from the Java world, after all... ;)

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Most Recent Reviews

Peter Bex says:
Feels like an abandoned project  
2.0
   
written over 13 years ago

Simpletest used to be a pretty decent test framework, but unfortunately its maintainer has very little time to spend on it. Even though there is still work being done on the subversion tree and he actively helps people on the mailinglist, the last official and stable release is from 2008. This release still has some PHP4-isms in it (especially regarding the way it uses objects and pass-by-reference), and if you enable strict warnings, PHP bombards you with warnings.

The documentation isn't great with several completely different-looking static html websites providing information about it, but you can get the information you need from it. I think newer documentation is concentrated in the PHPDocumenter-generated API docs (which is a mess all in itself), which PHPUnit also uses for their main documentation.

The API is very similar to PHPUnit too, as both were inspired by the xUnit type of test frameworks. However, PHPUnit has a much more active development team, has a much more thorough documentation and, as far as I've been able to determine, is used by more projects. Drupal is a notable exception as it has embraced Simpletest in their previous release, but they ripped out all that code in favor of their own implementation (which they confusingly also call SimpleTest...)

Both SimpleTest and PHPUnit consist of a tangled web of classes which are quite hard to understand unless you are willing to dive deep into the bowels of the system, but I guess that's just typical for xUnit type frameworks. It came from the Java world, after all... ;)

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