cookies and code

Well I gave my hastely assembled and zero practiced version of a FlexUnit4 and mock-as3 presentation last night at the Adogo and I only caught a few people snoozing, so that is a +1 in my book. Unit testing can be extremely dry for most people, but building tools to make me more productive always holds my interest so that’s how I’ll explain my enthusiasm. Thanks to Drew Bourne and Michael Labriola for the help with the presentation. I blubbered through most of the points on their APIs and definitely mispoke on a few instances, but as long as the recording doesn’t get too much traffic we should be fine. Thanks as well to Russ, Vincent, Brian, and Greg for keeping me company after the meeting over a few beers while I waited for my wife’s flight to get in.

I’ve published the source and recording for anyone who is interested.

Over the last few weeks, while preparing my presentation for FlexCamp Miami a bit more, I have run into quite the plethora of tools to help developers test their Flex applications. I thought I’d take some time to break down what types of tools are available to help us out.

Unit Testing Frameworks

• fluint – http://code.google.com/p/fluint/
• flexunit – http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexunit/FlexUnit
• funit – http://blog.funit.org/
• asunit – http://www.asunit.org/

Mock Object Frameworks

• mock-as3 – http://code.google.com/p/mock-as3/
• asmock – http://asmock.sourceforge.net/
• mock4as – http://code.google.com/p/mock4as/

Other useful libraries

• hamcrest-as3 – Assertion library – http://github.com/drewbourne/hamcrest-as3/tree/master
• asx – Extension methods for AS3 base types – http://github.com/drewbourne/asx/tree/master
• loom – Byte-code weaving framework for AS3 – http://code.google.com/p/loom-as3/

My favorite combination right now is fluint, mock-as3, hamcrest-as3, and asx. Although asmock supports type-safe mocking, I’m not a big fan of the record/replay model; for now I’m gonna stick with mock-as3 and wait until it supports type-safe mocks (<cough>loom integration<cough>. I’ve also found a major need for stubs when classes in my integration tests depend on HTTPService and RemoteObject. Sometimes its tough to mock out these classes because of complex interfaces these objects maintain, so I’ve come up with a pretty cool way of handling this. Hopefully I can publish the sample code here in the next few days for those who are interested.

I’d also like to give props to a couple people I’ve been working with in the community: Michael Labriola, Max Porges and Drew Bourne. Mike is working tirelessly to bring a more modern unit testing framework, a la JUnit 4 + more, to Flex via fluint along with tons of other initiatives. mock-as3, hamcrest-as3, and asx are all APIs that Drew has written; hamcrest-as3 alone is going to be providing some really powerful integration for assertions in unit testing frameworks. Max has been chipping away at the ABC spec with loom for months now, and once finished it’s going to provide a lot of great potential for more mature tooling/libraries in the Flex world … think AOP. Each of these code-bases are intuitive, easy to use, and were some of the biggest pieces missing from the Flex testing world until now. Keep up the great work guys! With any luck, we may soon have the tools we need to be as productive as developers in almost every other language out there.