Knapsack Pro

Intern vs PHPUnit comparison of testing frameworks
What are the differences between Intern and PHPUnit?

Intern

https://github.com/theintern/intern

PHPUnit

https://phpunit.de/
Programming language

JavaScript

PHP

Category

Unit Testing, Functional Testing

Unit Testing

General info

Intern is minimal test system for JavaScript designed to write and run consistent.

Intern is a complete test system for JavaScript designed to help you write and run consistent, high-quality test cases for your JavaScript libraries and applications. Using Intern we can write tests in JavaScript and TypeScript using any style like TDD, and BDD. Intern can run unit tests in most browsers that support ECMAScript

PHPUnit is a unit testing framework for the PHP programming language

PHPUnit is a programmer-oriented testing framework and is an instance of the xUnit architecture for unit testing frameworks.
xUnit
Set of frameworks originating from SUnit (Smalltalk's testing framework). They share similar structure and functionality.

No

Yes

It's an instance of the xUnit architecture for unit testing frameworks
Client-side
Allows testing code execution on the client, such as a web browser

Yes

Intern is a complete test system for JavaScript It Runs in the browser and can test any front-end component and functionality

Yes

It can perform Unit tests and can test various front-end components and behaviours
Server-side
Allows testing the bahovior of a server-side code

Yes

Since it is a complete testing system that can test any type of JavaScript code, it can test server-side behaviour and components as well

Yes

By performing unit tests on singular back-end components
Fixtures
Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data (fixtures) that are test-local. This ensures specific environment for a single test

N/A

Yes

By use of a setup code. The setup code consists of two Important template functions, the 'setUp()' function (called to create the objects to be tested) and 'tearDown()' function (called to cleanup the objects which you tested)
Group fixtures
Allows defining a fixed, specific states of data for a group of tests (group-fixtures). This ensures specific environment for a given group of tests.

N/A

Yes

It does support group fixtures
Generators
Supports data generators for tests. Data generators generate input data for test. The test is then run for each input data produced in this way.

N/A

Licence
Licence type governing the use and redistribution of the software

FreeBSD License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Mocks
Mocks are objects that simulate the behavior of real objects. Using mocks allows testing some part of the code in isolation (with other parts mocked when needed)

Intern uses the Dojo Toolkit’s AMD loader. To mock, you should be able to just use the standard AMD 'map' feature, else you can use third party libraries like sinon.js

Yes

One of its main features is that PHPUnit comes with out of the box support for Mock objects
Grouping
Allows organizing tests in groups

Yes

You can group tests into Suites which may be specified as file paths or using glob expressions, there is typically one top-level suite per module.

Yes

It allows grouping of tests and by using the @group annotation one can tag a test to belong to one or more groups
Other
Other useful information about the testing framework