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?
12 Answers
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 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.
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