cookies and code

For a one day event, FlexCamp Miami had tons of information packed into its 8 sessions. Greg Wilson started us out with a great intro to some of the new features coming in Gumbo (Flex 4) followed by David Tucker digging down into the persistence side of AIR, along with some new 1.5 features. After the break, Max blew away the crowd with loom and some AS3 internals followed by Andrew Powell and some awesome examples of using Merapi to bring some deeper OS interaction to AIR. We broke for lunch and then Christian Saylor gave a really motivating presentation on the importance of UX for developers. I had to follow him with my CI presentation, which didn’t even compare and ran long, but then Jeremy Grelle swooped back in and kept everyone’s attention with Milestone 2 of the new Spring/BlazeDS integration (released this last Wednesday). Laura Arguello finished out the day with a cool introduction to Mate. Universal Mind did a great job with the event, lunch was good, and my brain is full.

I should have my code available on the Adogo SVN server this week, I’d just like to add an integration testing example before I commit it. Look for Max and my code/presentations there soon. Hopefully we can convince UM to have another one of these a little further North … say Orlando? I think I know a few Central Florida user groups that could help promote it.

NOTE: If you ever make your way down to Coral Gables, give Titanic Restaurant and Brewery a try. They’ve got some really tasty microbrews and even more delicious food. I recommend the Captain Smith’s Rye Ale, super great. For food, I had the Shrimp Po-boy which came with 6 huge tailed shrimp and a nice remoulade. Thanks to Greg for the great meal!

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.