True Functional testing in Yii
<p>We are searching for a way to do Functional testing in yii.
According to wikipedia: </p>

<blockquote>
  <p>"Functional testing is a quality assurance (QA) process and a type of
  black-box testing that bases its test cases on the specifications of
  the software component under test. Functions are tested by feeding
  them input and examining the output"</p>
</blockquote>

<p>Therefore to test our controllers we want to provide an input (POST/GET/PUT), and test their output</p>

<p>Yii defines functional testing <a href="http://www.yiiframework.com/wiki/261/functional-testing-in-yii-using-goutte-and-phpunit/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>: </p>

<p>However, it doesn't really seam to be a model of functional testing.  </p>

<p>Since it uses Selenium, it seams that it is more an End to End test.  I unfortunately can not use this because my entire front end has been created in Angular JS.  Therefore, Protractor is what we use to control the browser NOT selenium.  What we are looking for is a way to test our Controllers - so we want to MOCK a POST/GET/PUT to our controllers and test their output WITHOUT launching a browser.</p>

<p>Any ideas how we can test our controllers without launching a browser? What is the accepted way of doing things in Yii 1.1.15?</p>