# Preface **PH**ing **I**s **N**ot **GN**U make; it's a PHP project build system or build tool based on Apache Ant. You can do anything with it that you could do with a traditional build system like GNU make, and its use of simple XML build files and extensible PHP "task" classes make it an easy-to-use and highly flexible build framework. Features include running PHPUnit and SimpleTest unit tests (including test result and coverage reports), file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, Smarty template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS/SVN operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, documentation generation (DocBlox, PhpDocumentor) and much more. If you find yourself writing custom scripts to handle the packaging, deploying, or testing of your applications, then we suggest looking at the Phing framework. Phing comes packaged with numerous out-of-the-box operation modules (tasks), and an easy-to-use OO model for adding your own custom tasks. Phing provides the following high level features: - Easy to read XML buildfiles - Rich set of predefined tasks - Easily extendible via PHP classes - Platform-independent: works on UNIX, Windows, MacOSX - No required external dependencies apart from a working PHP5 installation - Built & optimized for ZendEngine2/PHP5