java

I have recently converted some of my PHP projects over to use the awesome Phing build tool. Phing is similar to Apache Ant, a tool I am familiar with from my Java development days. I have crafted Phing's build.xml for QueryPath to handle building packages, generating API docs, running coverage analyses, linting, and (of course) running QueryPath's ~250 tests.

Having left IDEs behind for the time being, I have been working hard to build an personalized toolchain for PHP development. I've settled on TextMate as my editor (though I still use vim quite often). One thing I wanted to be able to do is run unit tests from within TextMate.

Initially I built a shell script to run the unit tests. But after moving to Phing, it seemed like it should be possible to take advantage of Phing's unit test running abilities (and lovely HTML output) from within TextMate. Working this out took two major stages:

1. Writing a custom target in Phing's build.xml
2. Creating a simple TextMate bundle for running Phing tasks

This article shows how to accomplish each of these steps.