So after a very welcomed summer lull in travel, I am gearing up for the fall speaking season. A good portion of my time this fall will be spent discussing, encouraging the use of, and getting Feedback on the FlexUnit 4 project. The rest will be spent teaching about the early architecture and internals of the future Flex 4 product.

If you have tried either of these and want to discuss, or if you haven't had the time and want to learn more first, please come and support one of the following great events where I will be presenting.

September 5th, Rimini, Italy at Flash Camp on the Beach

Testing with Flex and Flash Builder

October 5th - 7th, Los Angeles, CA at Adobe Max, Los Angeles, CA

5th - Test Driven Development with Flash Builder
5th - Creating Custom Components in Flex 4
5th - Book Signing and Meet the Authors Event

6th - Creating Custom Components in Flex 4
6th - Battle of the Flex Frameworks Panel

7th - Creating Custom Components in Flex 4- Twice

Also, in the next couple of days we will be announcing the details of a special event on the 6th and 7th in coordination with the 360|Max unconference for individuals interested in becoming contributors to the FlexUnit 4 project.

October 15th and 16th in Omaha, NE at the Heartland Developers Conference

15th - From Concept to Concrete: Programming a Designer's Vision
16th - Reanimating Dead Data with Flex

October 17th and 18th in Raleigh, North Carolina at CFinNC

Next Generation Testing

I hope you have the opportunity to participate and engage with the Flex community at some of these community events.

Cheers,
Mike

Alright, it has been an insane few months but we are ready. FlexUnit 4 Beta 2 is now available on the adobe open source site. You can download the turnkey project to play with built libraries quickly or follow the directions on the Source page to grab the source yourself.

There are a huge number of fixes and enhancements in this version, all of which you can find for yourself on the release notes page but the largest change of note is the availability of CI tasks and a CI listener to allow easy hooks into the continuous integration system of your choice. A lot of hard work went into building and vetting these out on different platforms but I wanted to call out a few names in particular.

First, thanks to Peter Martin, because all of this was based on his original work for the FlexUnit .9 tasks. Second, thanks to Joe Adkins, Conrad Winchester, Brian LeGros, Xavi Beumala and Simeon Bateman all of who contributed to development, testing and/or generally being good spirits despite inevitable development slow-downs and hiccups. This is beta code, so there are a couple of caveats and to-do items still on the list, so please be sure to check out the README file in the sample project, or read it on the wiki.

So, take a few minutes, grab the bits and play around. If you have any questions or comments, in particular around the new CI tasks, head over to the FlexUnit forums. If you believe we mutually disagree on the definition of a functional feature, then please log it into the bug database.

This is a completely community run project and your help and support are always welcome.

Cheers,
Labriola

About a year back I remember reading a blog post called JUnit in 60 seconds. At the time I pondered how great it would be to have these features in Flex. Little did I know that today I would be writing this post introducing the Flex world to FlexUnit 4.

So, first a little background. FlexUnit 4 is the name for an upcoming release of FlexUnit. It represents the best features of the FlexUnit project combined with the best features of the Fluint project. It is built on top of a newly created foundation designed to support the latest techniques used in the JUnit testing community, but written for the specific requirements and needs of the Flash Player. Top all that off with an extensibility layer that encourages developers to create new types of test runners and extensions while simplify the process of integrating the results into IDEs and continuous integration environments, and it should give you an idea why I am excited about this release.

If it sounds interesting to you as well, the public alpha of this upcoming release is now available as a turnkey test project you can download from the adobe open source site. I hope you will use it to learn and explore the new features, and to provide feedback about any bugs you find along the way. However, it is an alpha, so locations and names of classes, signatures of methods and even which features are supported are all subject to change before release. It is not be advisable to use this as your production testing system.

Speaking of features, let's jump in. There is a bit more content to go through than the original 60 second tutorial, so, I think you will need 4-6 minutes to get through it all. To keep things consistent, many of these examples are adapted right from the JUnit in 60 seconds site referenced above.

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At the end of last week Fluint 1.1.0 was released. For those of you that don't know, Fluint is a unit and integration testing framework that was originally developed as an internal tool here at digital primates. We decided to open it up to the world as we thought there was some benefit. Turns out that others thought so too.

The greatest thing about this new release is that almost all of the code was written and submitted by community members using the product. Here at DP we have been making some changes internally that we intend to offer back to the project (if the community wants to incorporate them) but in the meantime, the new build offers:

• Better differentiation of errors and failures
• Compliant XML output that can be used with JUnitReport and Surefire
• A method of running Fluint on a headless CI server
• Improved ant tasks
• Improved separation of the test runner and tests with modules
• Bug fixes and a menagerie of other features

At the end of the day, I am just proud to be a part of the project and want to offer a thank you to those who helped on the forums, submitted code or even just complained to bring things to our attention. So, thank you.

Soon we will begin active dialog on the next round of features, so if you are interested, please join the discussion.

Cheers,
Labriola

Tomorrow, July 10th, I will be presenting at the Michigan Flex User's Group (http://www.theflexgroup.org/) at Michigan State University. I will be talking about Navigating and Extending the Flex framework.

In essence, the talk is one part understanding component development and lifecycle. One part understanding the source code that comes with flex and one part everything else (that last part means whatever people want to know coupled with some fun things like how to extend components the right way, the wrong way, and what to do when you just want to give up and rebuild the framework yourself)

I have never actually managed to speak at this group before, despite only being a few hours drive east of the office. In any case, I hope to see some of you there with questions so we can have some fun and get off topic quickly (in a really good way).

Labriola

Okay, so since the last time I managed to blog, I had an excellent time presenting 'Dense and Hot' in Milan Italy for 360 Flex. It was a great time with a great bunch of presenters. I am looking forward to what Tom and John manage to do with their next conference. Cheers Guys.

I presented at a few events for Adobe and BEA, Flex Camp Wall Street, the Boston Flex Incubator group and the new Chicago Flex User Group. This week I am out in San Jose for the Adobe Community Summit and learning about the amazing things Adobe has in the pipeline. All I can say, is the next year is going to be exciting.

Next week I am presenting a hands-on lesson in advanced component development and skinning at WebManiacs. Followed closely by 'Dense and Hot' at webDU in Sydney Australia.

And just to bring things back around to the beginning, I will be presenting a brand new presentation at 360 Flex San Jose in August. It's an hour and twenty minutes on the internals of data binding, which will, in my professional opinion, be absolutely awesome.

Attached to this post are all of the slides I have been promising. Next week I will post the WebManiacs slides.

To all those that made these past events great, thanks, each of these events was fantastic in its own way. I hope to see the rest of you at WebManiacs and 360 Flex.

Labriola

The last few weeks have been rough. Serious client projects, exploring unexplored territory in the Flex/FMS and Flex/Java realms, way to many hours in front of computers that seem to get slower with every key I type. The weather sucks in Chicago and simply refuses to become spring.

But a shipment from Peachpit on Wednesday helped bring me out of my manic death spiral. The Flex 3 Training from the Source Books arrived. Less than a month after the release of Flex 3, the new book (another collaboration between Tapper, Boles, Talbot and I on the authoring side. Berling and Thomas on the editing) managed to make its way to the shelves.

We started working on this book at the last FlexManiacs (now WebManiacs) conference, so almost a year ago. Books take an impossibly long time to do well, and I am hoping this one works for those that choose to buy it. There are new lessons on modularizing Flex apps, AIR basics and using the profiler as well as countless small reworks and additions throughout the remaining lessons.

Right now Tapper and I are actually working diligently on our AIR book and trying to stay in front of an 'aggressive' schedule for completion. The timing is actually really good as I leave for 360 Flex Milan in a week and this will give me plenty to do on the plane.

So, for those of you who are in, or might make it to Europe, I look forward to seeing you soon. I plan on lugging a handful of these books over the Atlantic to give away to those who ask. For those of you on the fence about going to 360 Flex, just register already. They just announced that day one is actually free for everyone, now you have no excuse. It is going to be another great Flex conference and I am anxious to see it play out.

Labriola

First, Flex Camp Chicago is coming up on January 18th. There are a handful of seats left so if you want to come learn some flex, eat food and geek out with us then sign up fast.

Second, Adobe Evangelists will be crisscrossing the world showing off new features and demos while giving away schwag and raffling off Flex Builder 3 and CS3 versions. If you are using Flex now or plan to in the near future, don't miss these events.

Find out when they are coming to your city and plan on seeing us at the Chicago tour stop on February 5th.

Labriola

On January 18th, Mike Nimer, Jeff Tapper, Josh Berling, Shashank Tiwari and I will be presenting at Flex Camp Chicago. After a morning keynote from Bob Tierney, we will begin a full day of flex sessions.

You can read more at http://www.flexcampchicago.com/, but don't wait too long to register. We only have room for about 100 attendees and the spots are going very quickly.

Labriola

Tapper, Nimer Associates and Digital Primates have merged. Yep, it's true and I am pretty damn excited about it.

It brings together two groups with the immense experience in the flex, coldfusion and flash arena, but more importantly, it is brings together a group of people who are committed to these communities.

The merger is going to provide us all further opportunities to blog, speak at conferences and user groups, open source additional code to the community and continue our work on books for the Flex, AIR and actionscript world.

Our plans for world domination are yet unwritten, but that has never stopped us before.

Labriola

P.S. Send us resumes. We need developers and UX folks, damn it!