Here is the slides for the Refactoring talk I did last Thursday at the Orlando Ruby User Group meeting. In case you want to hear me speaking along with the slides, I’ve put it up on vcasmo also.

So you’ve probably heard of ZenTest/Autotest, right?

In case you haven’t, it is a Ruby gem that (among other things) automatically runs your tests whenever it notices that a file in you project has changed. It’s a great productivity boost, because it saves you from having to run your tests each time you make a change to your program. The perfect tool if you are doing TDD.

So I wanted to get this autotest functionality going for projects in other languages - like PHP, for example - but apparently ZenTest/Autotest only works within Ruby projects.

Talking to the EnvyLabs’ guys I was told about Watchr, a Ruby gem that monitors files matched by a regular expression and triggers a user defined command whenever a file changes. That’s enough to get you started in an autotest-like tool for PHP - or just about any other language.

I’ve setup an example PHP project of Watchr playing an autotest role in a PHP project:

View on Vimeo.

The source code from this example can be seen at http://github.com/caike/watchr_running_php