This week we posted a video with Stephan Janssen.  Stephan is a great guy and an important voice in the Java and Flex communities. Check out the video here.

While I was sipping Pina Colada’s in Mexico last week, my video cast partner posted Episode 2 of Drunk On Software. In this Episode, we discuss FlexMonkey with Stu Stern.  This was extra fun to record (and hopefully to watch), as Stu is always entertaining with his unique and interesting banter.  Enjoy!

http://www.drunkonsoftware.com/2008/10/30/episode-2-flex-automated-testing-and-flexmonkey/

James Ward and I launched our new video podcast tonight, DrunkOnSoftware.com.  The concept is a bit silly, and of course tongue in cheek as we aren’t drunks, but one of the main things we have in common is the ability to not take ourselves too seriously.  We do love talking about software and the occasional drink.  So, we figure why not make that our niche… everybody needs a niche.  We are planning on talking about all things software, but will probably focus more on Adobe Flex than other things.

In the first episode, we talk about the Adobe Flash Player 10.  James shares about the main updates of interest to developers.

Please contact us if you are in the Denver area and would like to appear on the Videocast.  We would love to have you!

You know you had a good idea when you see someone else implement it, and they do it better than you may have yourself.  Brian Lesser posted an article this week on O’Reilly titled, “MVC As Anti-Pattern.”  I have been meaning to write a similar article for a while.  Internally at Gorilla Logic, Stu Stern and I have had a long running dialog questioning the wisdom of bringing in full blown MVC frameworks into Flex (especially model 2 like implementations with a front controller).

Brian Lesser does a good job of arguing against implementing the traditional MVC pattern within Flex applications.  Lesser outlines the language/framework features in Flex that are far different than the language MVC grew out of many years back (i.e. Smalltalk), including discussing data binding and event listeners in Flex.  In addition to his main points, I am still a little awestruck at the willingness of developers to drag in a framework that quadruples or more the amount of code without adding much clear value.

Obviously, architecture is important and Lesser does spend some time discussing what the layers look like within Rich Client applications.  I am still digesting this section, but my initial reaction is that his ideas fit well with how I view application architecture in context of RIA’s (hard to go wrong when you borrow from Eric Evans).  It really is an exciting time as the move to rich client runtimes not only allows us to build better applications for end users, but forces us to think differently about the architecture.

Flash Player 10 is out tonight.  There are some pretty nice looking features, but it looks like we will have to wait for Flex 4 to really take advantage of them.  Read my write up on the release on InfoQ.com here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/10/flash10.

The current state of the Flex eco-system continues to remind me of Java in the mid-to-late-1990’s.  Overall, it is at such an exciting place.  At the same time it can be frustrating, as some of the immaturities can really make it challenging to build quality applications.  However, even that can bring more excitement, as it really just means more opportunities to contribute.  And, I am ecstatic that Gorilla Logic is now finding ways to do that!

A couple of months ago, I blogged about the state of Flex, including a post on the state of testing tools.  We never did find a tool that satisfied our needs.  So, Gorilla Logic (mostly Stu Stern) finally built one, and open sourced it!   The new project is called: FlexMonkey.

Here is an overview of FlexMonkey’s features:

• Non-invasive. Requires no modifications to your application source.
• Records and plays back Flex UI interactions.
• UI Interactions can be edited and replayed.
• Generates FlexUnit TestCases.
• Integrated with FlexUnit.
• Handles all Flex UI events.
• Uses Flex Automation API to provide native control over your flex app. Requires no javascript or browser plug-ins to use.
• Unit tests are written entirely in ActionScript. No other programming or special purpose scripting languages are needed to develop comprehensive UI test suites.

Check out the tutorial: http://code.google.com/p/flexmonkey/wiki/QuickTutorial

You can also check out an example application compiled with Flex Monkey: http://keystone.gorillalogic.com/~sstern/MonkeyContacts.html#.

I just finished up an InfoQ.com post where I interviewed Matt Quinlan of Appcelerator: http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/09/appcelerator-ria.  Check it out to learn more about another interesting option for building RIA’s.

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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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.

The true object oriented nature of the Flex components is excellent. I am sure there have been a number of “real” UI frameworks over the years that did things like this, but I have never had the opportunity to work with one…. So, being able to actually apply OO principles to UI development has been a pure joy. In addition, the Flex framework provides virtually every component I could ever imagine being needed for enterprise applications. This was always a huge challenge with Java web frameworks, as they always seemed to depend on the community to fill the “gaps,” if you can call the components of UI framework, the “gaps.” Anyhow, there are a few issues that seem to come out of the maturity questions I raised initially. For a few examples:

1. The default button implementation does not offer the ability to wrap the text. The fact that the components are really OO paid off here, as we were able to extend the core button and add this functionality. It was nice to be able to be able to work around the limitation this way, but this is clearly a common thing that people would want to do with a button.
2. We have been experiencing general difficulty with the ComboBox. It was surprising to have to set things manually – not being able to provide a reference that has the same value, but having to find the actual object in the list and provide him for setting the selected object, etc… The data grid layout breaks out of the columns on us when our custom ComboBox is clicked on… just weirdness.
3. Another surprise was that there was no default option to allow users to resize the default components. This would seem quite natural for an animation engine. Anyhow, we used the following to implement resize on our custom title window pop-ups: http://myflex.wordpress.com/2008/03/05/resizable-collapsable-titlewindow/. We made a few tweaks for our custom needs, and did our best to hide this in our implementation so we can easily replace it if we find a better implementation.

Also, here a quick link on styling – since it took me a while to find this: http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/consulting/styleexplorer/Flex3StyleExplorer.html.

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