Continuous Integration: Automated database setup with Doctrine on Travis-CI

Testing is important — most people understand that by now. A lot of people write tests for their open source code already, but in-house testing is still hard. For example, many of us had an encounter with Jenkins: it runs well to a point where it becomes harder to maintain the Jenkins than it is to write tests. Another obstacle is test setup and environments: When I write and run tests, there is sometimes only so much I can do to mock and avoid actual calls to my storage backend....

August 13, 2012 · 4 min

Too much abstraction: Doctrine and PHP

Personally — I feel like I’m really, really late to get on the Doctrine train. I’ve tried Doctrine 1 a few years back and found it mostly too complicated for my needs. For all I know, I still find PEAR::DB and PEAR::MDB2 the perfect database abstraction layers (DBAL). Though of course they may or may not be totally up to date in terms of PHP etc.. The overall concept of an ORM never stuck with me....

July 6, 2012 · 5 min