Hudson definitively won me over with its clean interface and easy to setup tasks. Even plugin installation is a breeze and you can even do it right out of the comfort of your browser.

I found a nice tutorial about setting up Hudson with PHP here but I had some question marks hovering over my head during the installation so I have decided to write a more detailed installation tutorial.

If you are running a Debian flavored distribution (yes I mean Ubuntu) take a look at the tutorial, you should have Hudson working with your PHP projects in no time.

Bonus points if you integrate your Hudson installation to act as your staging server.

Open up Terminal.app and enter “sudo su” and enter your password when asked (I guess you must be using an account with administrator privileges).

pear upgrade PEAR
pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
pear install --alldeps phpunit/PHPUnit

That’s it. phpunit binary should be in your path now.

p.s.

For some reason phpUnit that is being used by Zend Studios (6.1) does not have mbstring extension compiled and that makes it unusable for me. I guess there is a way to force PHP interpreter that is being used in the Zend Studio to run with the mbstring extension, but this is a faster approach. Hudson or phpUnderControl (whichever you like) will take care of the code coverage reports.

There were also some things I really don’t agree that much. He showed a small PHP frameworks “benchmark” measuring the speed (response time and transactions per second) for each of this frameworks to output the simple HTML page printing out the “Hello world” string. Zend Framework (the framework of my choice) didn’t perform all that bad. Symfony was around 30% slower, and Solar was about 2 times faster. If you are really interested in the numbers have a look at the slides from the session.

The methodology was a little bit questionable. I believe that frameworks offering a caching solution out of the boxes should have been tested with the caching enabled.

Another thing he talked about was removing unnecessary require_once() and include_once() calls from the applications, and their impact on the frameworks speed, and how those calls are handled in PHP internally and how to set up your include path to minimize the impact).

Zend Framework didn’t do that well, as you can see on the graphs plotted out for every framework (dashed lines represent require_once() calls). The main reason for this is I guess that ZF is a loosely coupled framework. The other reason is probably that the ZF is still not mature enough to focus on the optimization issues while there is still so much other work to be done.