In 2002 Macromedia used the term “Rich Internet Applications” (RIA) to describe the next generation of web applications that have all of the benefits of a traditional desktop application, with the flexibility of being deployed via the Internet.

However, it’s 2008 and RIA has not been able to penetrate the business application sector with any real success. The old days of RIA are history. (Maintenance nightmares, weird or no unit testing, and little friendliness toward other agile developer practices.)

With a RIA framework like Adobe Flex it’s now possible to unit test RIA applications and even write tests first. It’s possible to connect up to a CI server just like server-side code and pick up coverage stats. It’s possible to evolve a simple design incrementally and emergently.

The speakers will model how to make standard agile development practices work in the RIA world: Refactoring, Test First Design, Simple Design, Continuous Design, and Continuous Integration & Automated Builds.

The bottom line is many businesses have invested much time and money into their existing applications and their staff. For this reason, this session will guide the attendees on how to refactor an existing web application with familiar server-side technologies. We’ll show how to integrate Flex into existing applications in order to build a next generation application that will delight users.

Rather than trying to teach the basics of Flex, the speakers will demonstrate how to develop robust applications leveraging the Flex framework in concert with enterprise technologies like Java. These applications can be deployed not only to the web but also to the desktop using the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

 

Process/Mechanics

 

Refactoring to RIA’s will be a demonstrative (tutorial-like) session geared towards Java developers that would like to refactor existing applications in an agile way. Test First, CI, and other friendly agile practices will be key in making this possible.

The session will consist of live code and practice demonstrations leveraging an already existing application. Requirements for creating a new rich client interface will be explored and code will be refactored in a Red/Green/Refactor manner.

So I’ve decided to start a Google Code project called agile-flex, where a couple of other developers and I will attempt to build some agile tools for the Flex framework, starting with a test runner that will help enable continuous integration for Java, .NET, or even just plain old Actionscript. The runner will likely be based off an article I found from Aaron Spjut here. In a nutshell we will create a test runner in Adobe AIR that will generate XML output similar to JUnit and NUnit for the CI server to be able to interpret. This will also enable the generation of report artifacts using the JUnit Report tasks or even a custom XSLT if desired. I’ll post more details as the project continues.

UPDATE… The Flex-Mojos project now fulfills this need, so I’ve deleted the Google Code Project that we started for this.