cookies and code

It seems like every month, the Adogo and RAnDOM meetings creep up on me. That being said, we’ve pushed the Adogo meeting for February back to February 9th this month instead of yesterday, February 2nd, to try and make up some time to prep. I will be presenting on the topic of “Continuous Integration” (primer) and afterward we’ll be having a round-table discussion about what everyone’s been up to and working on. Should be a pretty lay back meeting and I promise to put everyone to sleep, so bring your pillows. This will be a practice run for my the presentation that I will be giving at FlexCamp Miami on March 6th, so if you like what you see (with, or without. the sexual overtones), you should try to make it down for a day of fun with Flex.

See ya Monday, if you can make it; if not, thanks for sparing me the embarrassment that was inevitable. :’(

Big thanks to Doug, Bill, Jim, Mike, Don, Boss boss, and everyone else who joined me for my presentation on Continuous Integration and Flex at Kennedy Space Center. I ended up running around an hour and forty minutes giving an overview of the Adobe Flex domain and continuous integration as a whole. Thank you everyone for taking the time out of your busy schedules to tough through the presentation; I hope I have failed you all equally.

As promised, below are links to the materials from the presentation that I used as well as links to other resources you may find helpful.

Subversion – http://subversion.tigris.org/
Apache Ant – http://ant.apache.org/
Flex Ant Tasks – Use the libraries included in the Flex SDK 3.2 distribution
Fluint Library and Ant Tasks – http://code.google.com/p/fluint/
mock-as3 – http://code.google.com/p/mock-as3/
Hudson – https://hudson.dev.java.net/
Example Application and Component – http://brianlegros.com/blog/files/example_apps.zip
Slides – http://brianlegros.com/blog/files/slides.pdf

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate email @ me at brianlegros dot com.

NOTE: The Fluint test runners and reports that you saw in my presentation were using a code base that has yet to be released by the Fluint team, but will be hopefully soon. We have a lot of great working going on at the Fluint project, so I’d encourage you all to check out the Google Code site as well as the Fluint mailing list.

Here’s the thing about proof-of-concept projects, they always get the high risk technology questions out of the way, but they never manage to expose the stupid gotchas that are coming down the line when you go to make them into a reality. Case in point, unit testing in Flex and continuous integration. In my last post, I spoke about how I got flex-mojos, ant, fluint, and Hudson all playing nice together. Please preface the following with the fact that I’m a terrible server admin, so there may be work arounds for the roadblocks I ran into, I’m just not aware of them.

So when our team went to deploy the PoC, we decided to use Windows. Our hope was that with the lack of headless support in AIR, Windows would provide us access to a windowing system even when a user isn’t authenticated thanks to the dreaded LocalSystem account. As expected, I was able to get Hudson up and running and the AIR test runner was working without issue while running as LocalSystem. I then needed to integrate a series of CI builds which we put together to automatically release our components. All of sudden, I had the need for user specific settings to interact with putty, plink, and SVN, then LocalSystem failed me. I setup a special user to run the service hosting Hudson and placed that user into the Administrator group to start; I figured once I had it working again, I’d restrict its rights … <crickets chirping>. So when I had finally gotten the automatic release builds working with the new user, I re-ran one of my previous CI builds only to find that the build would hang when the AIR runner for Fluint was executed. After hours of pouring over a solution (I even tried this registry hack for the service with no success), I decided that Windows just wasn’t going to work.

I decided to give Linux a shot and I have to say I had much better results; I chose Ubuntu for my PoC due to its simplicity for guys like me. As a nice plus, all of the SSH/SVN woes I experienced disappeared because I had a native SSH client and integration was just easy. I still had the issue however of needing to run AIR in a truly headless mode. I started with some tips I found on the Fluint mailing list and was able to get Xvfb up and running as a service. Integration with the Fluint Ant Task didn’t pan out easily though, so I again looked for another solution. I did some digging and as it turns out a lot of the Java/Swing folks had to solve the same problems we’re having to solve now before Java gained the ability to run Swing apps headlessly. I found this post on xvfb-run and it did the trick. In fact it worked out so well, that I went ahead and integrated it into the Fluint Ant task as an option. Effectively I just had it execute the AIR application with the “-a” flag so sysadmins who are picky about how xvfb-run is used may not like the lack of granularity I’ve built in, but it’s working for us. I know that FlexUnit has a similar issue since the Flash Player can’t be run in a headless-mode either, so this may be a good feature to add to the FlexUnit Ant task eventually too. On a side note, my changes to Fluint are being reviewed right now and it looks like I may get my branch merged into the next release fairly soon for anyone who is interested in finding binaries.

We’re still working to deploy on a different Linux distro at the moment, but I think we’ve finally managed to mitigate the risk of running a Flex build on a CI server for the different variations we’ve thrown together. If you see another post from me really soon, you’ll know the edge of the PoC sword got me again … stupid sneaky sword.

Recently I was tasked with streamlining our build process at work so we could get a continuous integration (CI) server up and running. We use the common stack of technologies found in most Flex shops (basic SDK, some libraries, and Flex Builder) as well as Maven. I ran into some challenges getting our CI process to work as we wanted, so I figured I’d go through some of the gotchas I encountered.

On the build side of things, when I came on, Maven was already in place using flex-mojos. Now I’m a big fan of the simplicity that Ant brings to the mix, but the issue of dependency management being baked into Maven makes it extremely appealing; I do like Ivy as an alternative when using Ant, but I wasn’t going to re-write the company’s build process. So we had flex-mojos building our source and producing artifacts for deployment to our team’s Maven repository, but we needed to integrate our unit tests into our build. We were using dpuint and were excited to see that fluint had been released with Ant support. Currently flex-mojos doesn’t support Fluint, although my colleagues tell me they’re working on it, so I knew I was going to have to use Ant. To start I had to get flex-mojos building my test SWF so I could use the Fluint Ant task. The Ant support in Fluint requires that you produce a module SWF that will work with their test runner written in AIR. After an hour of messing with flex-mojos, I was unable to get the compile, or test-compile, goal to do what I wanted, so I decided to use the maven-ant-run plugin to compile our tests as well.

Below is the snippet I was able to get working to compile our tests and execute the Fluint test runner:

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<properties>
   <flex.home>PATH_TO_FLEX_SDK_HOME</flex.home>
   <fluint.testrunner>PATH_TO_FLUINT_AIR_RUNNER_EXECUTABLE</fluint.testrunner>
</properties>
...
<build>
   <plugins>
      <plugin>
         <groupId>info.flex-mojos</groupId>
         <artifactId>flex-compiler-mojo</artifactId>
         <version>2.0M9</version>
         <extensions>true</extensions>
         <configuration>
            <skipTests>true</skipTests>
         </configuration>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
         <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
         <executions>
            <execution>
               <id>fluint-test-compile</id>
               <phase>test-compile</phase>
               <configuration>
                  <tasks>
                     <!-- Pull in Flex Ant Tasks -->
                     <taskdef resource="flexTasks.tasks" />
 
                     <property name="FLEX_HOME" location="${flex.home}" />
 
                     <!-- Create test-classes directory -->
                     <mkdir dir="${project.build.testOutputDirectory}" />
 
                     <mxmlc file="${project.build.testSourceDirectory}/AirRunner.mxml" 
                        output="${project.build.testOutputDirectory}/AirRunner.swf" 
                        keep-generated-actionscript="false">
 
                        <load-config filename="${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks/flex-config.xml" />
                        <source-path path-element="${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks"  />
                        <compiler.library-path dir="${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks" append="true">
                           <include name="libs" />
                        </compiler.library-path>
                        <compiler.library-path dir="${project.build.directory}/.." append="true">
                           <include name="libs" />
                        </compiler.library-path>
                        <compiler.library-path dir="${project.build.directory}" append="true">
                           <include name="*.swc" />
                        </compiler.library-path>
                     </mxmlc>      
                  </tasks>
               </configuration>
               <goals>
                  <goal>run</goal>
               </goals>
            </execution>
            <execution>
               <id>fluint-test-run</id>
               <phase>test</phase>
               <configuration>
                  <tasks>
                     <!-- Pull in Fluint Ant Task -->
                     <taskdef name="fluint" classname="net.digitalprimates.ant.tasks.fluint.Fluint" />     
 
                     <property name="test.report.loc" location="${project.build.directory}/surefire-reports" />
 
                     <!-- Create reporting directory -->
                     <mkdir dir="${test.report.loc}" />
 
                     <fluint debug="true" 
                        headless="true"
                        testRunner="${fluint.testrunner}" 
                        outputDir="${test.report.loc}" 
                        workingDir="${project.build.testOutputDirectory}">
 
                        <fileset dir="${project.build.testOutputDirectory}">
                           <include name="**/AirRunner.swf"/>
                        </fileset>
                     </fluint>      
                  </tasks>
               </configuration>
               <goals>
                  <goal>run</goal>
               </goals>
            </execution>
         </executions>
         <dependencies>
            <dependency>
               <groupId>org.apache.ant</groupId>
               <artifactId>ant</artifactId>
               <version>1.7.0</version>
            </dependency>
            <dependency>
               <groupId>flex.ant</groupId>
               <artifactId>flexTasks</artifactId>
               <version>1.0.0</version>
            </dependency>
            <dependency>
               <groupId>net.digitalprimates</groupId>
               <artifactId>FluintAnt</artifactId>
               <version>1.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
            </dependency>
         </dependencies>
      </plugin>
   </plugins>
</build>

Couple of things to point out about the above snippet:

• There are two dependencies on resources being available on the disk, the Flex SDK (flex.home property) and the Fluint Air Runner (fluint.testrunner property).
• Using Ant I had to create the “test-classes” and “surefire-report” directory to stick with Maven conventions.
• We adhered to the convention of naming our test runners for the Fluint Ant task “AirRunner.mxml” so we could use this snippet in a parent POM.
• I had to change the dependency for the maven-ant-run plugin from Ant 1.6.5, which is the default, to Ant 1.7.0, which is required by the Fluint Ant task.

You may also notice that I’m using snapshot versions of the Fluint library and the Fluint Ant task. I ended up having to change the source of the Fluint library, Ant task, and AIR runner to get Fluint to work as I wanted it to with my build. Fluint is an awesome unit testing library, it just needed some tweaks. I made changes to fix the following:

• The XML output from the Fluint AIR runner wasn’t compliant with what the Surefire Report plugin was expecting.
• The name of output file from the Fluint AIR runner was in the convention “TEST-*.xml” which the SureFire reporting plugin expects.
• Fluint had the notion of an error and failure being separate but it wasn’t implemented for the Flash or AIR test runners.
• The Ant task didn’t allow the user to specify a working directory so that the AIR runner could be launched from the appropriate directory.

I later found out that AIR and relative paths don’t play nicely together (= at all, unless there is helper code), so we also had to re-factor our test suites to NOT rely on any assets unless they are embedded or referenced with absolute URIs. This made the change to the Fluint Ant task kinda worthless, but I kept it in anyway for when AIR works in the future. Additionally, it’s important to note, that the “headless” mode in the Fluint AIR runner is really just a minimized window that closes after the XML report is written; if you plan on running your CI build on an OS without a windowing solution, then FLuint will not work since AIR does not support running in a true headless mode. On a side note, my changes should address issues #5 and #22 on the Fluint Google Code site; issue #21 should be solved by the Ant dependency fix I spoke about above and issue #20 is just a matter of the fluintAnt15.jar being compiled with Java 1.6 instead of 1.5, I believe. I’ve submitted these fixes along with my code to the Fluint guys in an email, just haven’t heard anything back yet.

So at this point I had the build process working as I wanted such that I could run “mvn clean deploy site” and find a snapshot in our team’s maven repository and site documentation generated. On to CI. I have used CruiseControl many times in the past, but the idea of being entrenched in XML, especially with all the Maven and Ant fun, was discouraging so I decided to give Hudson a try this time around. Wow … Hudson is amazing improvement over CruiseControl. Completely UI driven, I have yet to find myself digging through XML and best of all. The post-build support feel a little lighter than CruiseControl’s, but I think that’s just because I haven’t come across an X10 plugin so we can get a stop light or glowing orb setup. Hudson provides trend reporting on builds and unit tests as well as embedded reporting for unit tests and xdoclet-like documentation; it also has tons of Groovy integration which I really like (not that we’re using it … yet). Initially I chose to go with the pure Maven build for our projects, but I then decided to switch back to the free-style build; I couldn’t get trend reporting for unit tests to work with the pure Maven build, so I think my conventions are off for the Fluint reporting. In the free-style build I set the “site” directory as the Javadoc location and the “surefire-report” directory as the test report directory. Even though there is more configuration in a free-style build, it was simpler in the short run to get what I wanted in Hudson running. If unit test trend reporting isn’t as important to your CI needs, then the pure maven build may be more along the lines of what you’d like to use so that you can get the additional build trigger “Build whenever a SNAPSHOT dependency is built”. On a side note, I’m working towards using the FlexCover support in flex-mojos to make our site reports complete, but haven’t had a chance to dive in yet.

I hope some of the hurdles I encountered can help if you’re trying to get your CI process working with Flex. The flex-mojos, Fluint, and Hudson guys have some good walkthroughs/tutorials to cover the details I left out. I’m always up for suggestions, so definitely feel free to rip into my solutions.