I have finally gotten the chance to immerse myself in Flex code lately. I decided to do this series to capture my first hand experiences with Flex. Please share your feedback on the challenges and strengths I highlight. I would love to know if your experiences differ, or if you can fill in some of the gaps where I might be missing something. For those of you considering Adobe Flex, hopefully this will give you an accurate picture of building applications with Flex.

FlexBuilder provides a high quality IDE for developing Flex applications, especially for Java developers already familiar with the Eclipse IDE. It does cost money – please get over it. Good tools do tend to cost money, even though the Java community seems to have thrown this notion out the window – partly because we have adapted to using inferior tools.

I will say that it is a bit of a stretch for Adobe to suggest that the Flex Builder is ready for enterprise development on Linux. I have been living the Linux Flex Builder there, and there is absolutely no refactoring support (painful). This is an essential feature for any modern IDE. I know they have released the Linux version under Alpha, but many of their people have proclaimed it as bringing Flex development to Linux. There doesn’t appear to be any roadmap for when one can expect these features. So, I wouldn’t expect them anytime soon – my personal solution was to buy a Mac. Also, this is completely independent of the runtime – the Flash Player on Linux seems to work quite flawlessly in my experience.

Update 9/10/2008: Since this post, my company has launched a new Flex testing tool called FlexMonkey.  Read More about it here: http://ectropic.com/wordpress/?p=50.

I have finally gotten the chance to immerse myself in Flex code lately. I decided to do this series to capture my first hand experiences with Flex. Please share your feedback on the challenges and strengths I highlight. I would love to know if your experiences differ, or if you can fill in some of the gaps where I might be missing something. For those of you considering Adobe Flex, hopefully this will give you an accurate picture of building applications with Flex.

We have spent a bit of time evaluating FlexUnit and DPUnit. Both seem decent for unit testing, but don’t seem to solve the problem of doing full on automated UI testing for Flex applications. We are looking at a couple of recording tools (HP QuickTest professional & one from IBM), but it appears that they will be in the 5-10K range (and we can’t seem to get a call back from sales as of yet…). We really need something like HtmlUnit for use with traditional browser technologies. HtmlUnit allows us to mimic a client browser programmatically, and validate that the actual user interface renders and accepts input correctly. Is this what FlexUnit and/or DPUnit are supposed to do for us – are we missing something? If not, how are you approaching the testing of your Flex applications?

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