Continuous Integration with Flex

16 01 2008

Earlier today I had posed a question to a mailing list in the .NET community asking about Continuous Integration with Flex in the .NET world. After a couple of answers from people who obviously did not understand the question, because they just told me to google CruiseControl.NET, someone with some knowledge of TDD and Agile practices stepped up and pointed out the obvious point I was trying to make. There currently is no real good way to automate your FlexUnit tests in such a way that a CI server like CC.NET or HudsonCI would know whether or not all of the tests for your Actionscript classes passed or failed.

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.





Groovy, Grails and RIAs…Oh My!

14 01 2008

This past week I was fortunate enough to attend CodeMash v2.0.0.8 in Sandusky, Ohio. This conference is unlike anything I’ve ever been to, somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 Java programmers, .NET fan-boys and Ruby zealots all under one roof, and even having a little fun together. Read the rest of this entry »





Viva la RIA-volution

14 01 2008

Recently I’ve started working with Flex again after a long hiatus from the technology, and now I remember why I fell in love with the concept of Rich Internet Applications. I learned Flex a few years ago and due to the high cost of its server side components needed to run the applications I never found a home for it in any of my applications. So when I heard the news about Adobe open-sourcing Flex and making the SDK free as well as developing a free open source replacement for its LiveCycle Data Services called BlazeDS, I figured it was time to re-introduce myself to the Flex world. I’ve even found a promising Maven 2 plugin for building flex-apps here (http://code.google.com/p/israfil-mojo). Unfortunately it doesn’t support Flex 3 yet, or have a way to run my FlexUnit tests automatically, but I found it easier to use so far than the ServeBox plugin.








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