Well, I admit that I don't make automated testing as part of the web development process, so I don't really know the options (neither in python, nor in php). B

Well, I admit that I don't make automated testing as part of the web development process, so I don't really know the options (neither in python, nor in php). But back when I worked on a quite big web application with the front-end developed in php, we did two things to detect errors early: - before building a package to be deployed, run a syntax check on all php files. - caught all runtime exceptions and sent an email to ourselves with a stack trace. Sure it generated a lot of traffic in the beginning, but it was quite rewarding after we filtered out the duplicates. Effectively our users tested the code paths for us :) I think these can be done in any web development language, additionally to the automated testing. The other thing came to my mind, that in php you can detect if you are running as a webserver process or from command line. This creates a handy option to write automated tests too.