A Path Less Taken

Before you post a comment that says something like “there’s a Kohana 3 module that does that” let me just say I know and I’m grateful for it. Some of what I did was inspired by that module. The issue was when I tried getting the Kohana 3 unittest module to work to test my module it was giving me problems. I read the Kohana forum posts and the unittest documentation and could not find an answer. Finally I decided to start at the beginning and set up PHPUnit manually to work with Kohana 3 and my module to debug what I was doing wrong with unittest. In the process I discovered that getting PHPUnit to work with Kohana 3 wasn’t that hard after all. I thought I would share my solution in the event you are having similar issues.

It is the plight of the modern software engineer to know that there is always more than one way to solve a problem. Often we struggle with trade offs between usability (our own) and performance (the users). Eventually we individually or collectively chose “something” only to find that a single choice then cascades through our entire solution. If you don’t believe me you can validate this for yourself. Just ask a software engineer their “best practices” for managing dates and date logic and watch their eyes roll.