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

Vows

http://vowsjs.org/

PHPUnit

https://phpunit.de/
Programming language

JavaScript

PHP

Category

Functional Testing, Asynchronous Testing

Unit Testing

General info

Vows is a testing framework for NodeJS applications.

Vows supports Asynchronous BDD & continuous testing for two reasons first, reason is that node.js is asynchronous, and therefore our tests need to be, second,is to make test suites which target I/O libraries run much faster.

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

No

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 specifically tests Nodejs it tests back-end components and other server-side behaviours and functions

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

No

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.

No

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

Apache License 2.0

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)

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

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