Question

I was wondering if anyone that has experience in both this stuff can shed some light on the significant difference between the two if any?

Any specific strength of each that makes it suitable for any specific case?

Was it helpful?

Solution

This question is quite dated but as it is still getting traffic and answers I though I state my point here again even so I already did it on some other (newer) questions.

I'm really really baffled that SimpleTest still is considered an alternative to phpunit. Maybe i'm just misinformed but as far as I've seen:

  • PHPUnit is the standard; most frameworks use it (like Zend Framework (1&2), Cake, Agavi, even Symfony is dropping their own Framework in Symfony 2 for phpunit).
  • PHPUnit is integrated in every PHP IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans, Zend Stuide, PHPStorm) and works nicely.
  • Simpletest has an eclipse extension for PHP 5.1 (a.k.a. old) and nothing else.
  • PHPUnit works fine with every continuous integration server since it outputs all standard log files for code coverage and test reports.
  • Simpletest does not. While this is not a big problem to start with it will bite you big time once you stop "just testing" and start developing software (Yes that statement is provocative :) Don't take it too seriously).
  • PHPUnit is actively maintained, stable and works great for every codebase, every scenario and every way you want to write your tests.
  • (Subjective) PHPUnit provides much nicer code coverage reports than Simpletest
  • With PHPUnit you also get these reports inside your IDE (Netbeans, Eclipse, ...)
  • Also there are a couple of suggestings for a web interface to phpunit tests.

I've yet to see any argument in favor of SimpleTest. It's not even simpler to install since PHPUnit is available via pear:

pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear install phpunit/PHPUnit

and the "first test" looks pretty much the same.

As of PHPUnit 3.7 it's even easier to install it by just using the PHAR Archive

wget http://pear.phpunit.de/get/phpunit.phar
chmod +x phpunit-3.7.6.phar

or for windows just downloading the phar and running:

php phpunit-.phar

or when using the supported composer install ways like

"require-dev": {
    "phpunit/phpunit": "3.7.*"
}

to your composer.json.

For everything you want to test PHPUnit will have a solution and you will be able to find help pretty much anywhere (SO, #phpunit irc channel on freenode, pretty much every php developer ;) )

Please correct me if I've stated something wrong or forgot something :)

Overview of PHP Testing tools

Video: http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw11/schedule/sebastian-bergmann/

Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/sebastian_bergmann/the-php-testers-toolbox-osi-days-2011

It mentions stuff like Atoum which calls its self: "A simple, modern and intuitive unit testing framework for PHP!"

Full disclosure

I've originally written this answer Jan. 2011 where I had no affiliation with any PHP Testing project. Since then I became a contributor to PHPUnit.

OTHER TIPS

I prefer PHPUnit now, but when I started out I used SimpleTest as I didn't always have access to the command line. SimpleTest is nice, but the only thing it really has over PHPUnit, in my opinion, is the web runner.

The reasons I like PHPUnit are that it integrates with other PHP developer tools such as phing (as does SimpleTest), phpUnderControl, and Xinc. As of version 3.0 it has mocking support, is being actively developed, and the documentation is excellent.

Really the only way to answer this question for yourself is to try both out for a time, and see which fits your style better.

EDIT: Phing now integrates with SimpleTest as well.

  • I could NOT understand how to download and install PHPUnit.

  • I could, however, easily understand how to install SimpleTest.

    (As far as i can remember the instructions for PHPUnit said something along the lines of "install it via PEAR and we won't give any instructions on how to do it any other way") see:

  • http://www.phpunit.de/manual/current/en/installation.html

For SimpleTest, just download it and point to it from your code.

So Simpletest won for me.

Baphled has a nice article on SimpleTest vs PHPUnit3.

Half of the mentioned points in the accepted answer are simply not true:

SimpleTest has

  • the easier setup (extract to folder, include and run)
  • simply check the folder into version control (try to do that with phpunit nowadays :))
  • less dependencies and lots of extensions (webtester, formtester, auth)
  • a good code coverage reporter, which is easy to extend (dots, function names, colors)
  • a code coverage summary (finally landed in PHPUnit 4.x)
  • a decent web runner and an ajax web runner, with groups and single file executions
  • still better diff tool (with no whitespace or newline problems)
  • an adapter/wrapper to run SimpleTests by phpUnit and vice versa
  • compatibility PHP5.4+

The downside:

  • not industry standard (PHPUnit)
  • not actively maintained

I found SimpleTest was even easier than PHPUnit to set up. Just extract it and you are good to go. A benefit of this is if you are working at more than one machine, since you can store the whole testing framework the same way as your source code, and thereby know that you are using the same framework code. Especially if you modify it in any way.

So, I would say that a strength of SimpleTest is that it is very light weight and portable.

SimpleTest also ships with a very simple HTML GUI, which is quite easy to extend if you want to. As far as I know, PHPUnit does not include a HTML GUI, but there are GUI:s available to download, such as Cool.

Well I made a phpUnit web based UI test case runner and made it available on sourceforge. Uses ajax and has quite cool interface as well if you want to give it a shot check it at sourceforge. The project name is phpunitwebui and the website is http://phpunitwebui.sourceforge.net/

As it has been pointed, it's mostly a preference choice, as both will run the tests you write for it and report back the results.

The Simpletest web UI is very useful, but it can also sometimes get cumbersome. In my current project, I would have had to put more work into a system to make my application (an API) work with the web interface (set up apache correctly, copy files to the public_html root, etc.) than it would have been to simply run phpunit from the eclipse workspace. Therefore I choose PHPUnit. Also, the use of PEAR was a big plus since you don't need to manually track updates. Simply run pear upgrade once in a while and PHPUnit will be kept up-to-date.

I haven't checked Simple Test for a while, last time it had an eclipse plugin, which is a major factor for me, but it hasn't been updated for a long time. Sebastian Bergmann is still very actively working on PHPUnit, but it still lacks a good plugin for eclipse - but it is included for the new Zend Studio.

This question is old, but I want to add my experience: PHPUnit seems to be the standard now, but if you work with a legacy system that uses lots and lots of global variables, you may get stuck from the get go. It seems like there is no good way to do tests with global vars in PHPUnit, you seem to have to set your variables via $GLOBALS which is NO GOOD if you have tons of files setting global variables everywhere. OK some may say that the problem is in the legacy system but that doesn't mean we cannot do tests on such system. With SimpleTest such thing is simple. I suppose if PHPUnit allows us to include a file globally, not within any class/function scope then it wouldn't be too much of an issue as well.

Another promising solution is http://www.enhance-php.com, looks nice :)

This is from the point of view of a very casual PHP developer:

It took me two days to grasp PHPUnit, mostly trying to debug under Eclipse that I finally gave up.

It took me two hours to setup Simpletest including debug under Eclipse.

Maybe I will find the shortfalls of Simpletest in the future but so far it does well what I need: TestClasses, Mock objects, test-code debugging, and web interface for a quick snapshot of the situation.

Again: This from the point of view of a very casual PHP user (not even developer :-)

when there are thousands functions to test at one go, phpunit is way to go, simple test is falling short as it web based.

I am still using simple web to for small scale test .

But both are good

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