blog @ pebbl

Over the last few years I've been constantly surrounded by chatter with regard to Selenium, but had never been in a position to try it out. Yesterday that changed when Tate stated the need to have as near to continous integration as possible with the on-going enhancements to their core website.

So, this has led to lots of interesting learning and reading up on something that has - until now - only really been a buzzword for me :)

Unfortunately my first foray into this area led me straight to a rather annoying bug in a particular PHPUnit extension designed to integrate a PHP script with Selenium. Basically I set about doing what most coders would do when presented with an Object Orientated architecture, I attempted to extend PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase with my own functionality.

Initially everything seemed to work as expected... that is until one of my Selenium tests generated an error. Rather than a helpful error message, my script bugged out with the following unhelpful error:

Argument 5 passed to PHPUnit_Framework_Error::__construct() 
must be an instance of Exception, array given

On a closer look into the problem it seems that PHPUnit_Framework_Error.php has been upgraded, however the code in PHPUnit_Extensions_SeleniumTestCase.php hasn't.

class PHPUnit_Framework_Error extends Exception
{
    /**
     * Constructor.
     *
     * @param  string     $message
     * @param  integer    $code
     * @param  string     $file
     * @param  integer    $line
     * @param  Exception  $previous
     */
    public function __construct($message, 
                                $code, 
                                $file, 
                                $line, 
                                Exception $previous = NULL)
    {
        parent::__construct($message, $code, $previous);

        $this->file  = $file;
        $this->line  = $line;
    }
}

The fifth argument has been changed to expect an Exception object, whereas, whenever a new PHPUnit_Framework_Error is called into existence from PHPUnit_SeleniumTestCase.php, you get:

throw new PHPUnit_Framework_Error($buffer, 
                                  $e->getCode(), 
                                  $e->getFile(), 
                                  $e->getLine(), 
                                  $e->getTrace());

The last parameter is incorrect, it should be:

throw new PHPUnit_Framework_Error($buffer, 
                                  $e->getCode(), 
                                  $e->getFile(), 
                                  $e->getLine(), 
                                  $e);

Or at least changing it to the above fixes the issues I was experiencing, now my code warns about errors correctly. Just in case it's useful to anyone out there :)

Ok, so this isn't a tech post... I just felt the need to complain - please ignore me if you don't give a damn about the environment.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-19708915

If you read the article above, it is written with the view that "isn't this great, a renewable source of energy that will be good for everyone!". But aren't renewables supposed to be produced and used with little or no negative impact to the environment?

From what I've read butanol (and ethanol) still burn producing quite a bit of CO2, true, they burn cleaner that typical petrol (gasoline), but they still produce gases that we are supposed to be cutting down on... and now they've found a never ending way to produce a fuel that pollutes in this way. A fuel that will run on existing car systems, so there will be no reason for peope to change their habits or invest in better alternatives (i.e. hydrogen fuel cells).

How is that good news?

Actually, whether this is good news or not is probably all down to how Tullibardine was already "disposing" of it's by-products... If they were just chucking them into a never-ending bonfire then not much is lost.

I guess we don't really believe in all this CO2 "nonsense" after all, do we...?