thecrumb.com » flex

Testing Flex Applications?

Jim Priest — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 16:56:28 +0000

We are exploring using Flex more (goodbye Powerbuilder!) here at work. We are also doing more and more testing and hope to eventually implement continuous integration.

I’ve seen a few tools to unit test Flex but I’m curious how you test Flex at the application level? For our web applications we are currently using Selenium.

Is there something similar for Flex?

Flex, Air Updates For Linux

Jim Priest — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 12:09:42 +0000

This weekend I downloaded the Flex Builder Linux alpha, but ran into some issues and after digging around in the forums it was hinted that a new release would be out ‘soon’. Soon turns out to be this morning. Alpha 3 was released today! I’m looking forward to getting home and trying that out!

I also saw on Sean Corfield’s blog that an alpha release of Air for Linux is out too! Sean’s post also pointed to this nice article on Read Write Web discussing Flex and Air on Linux. The article had this nice tidbit:

In addition to AIR and Flex releases for Linux, Adobe announced that it had joined the Linux Foundation in an effort to help “accelerate the growth of RIA technologies on the Linux platform.”

Flex. No Linux Support? (yet)

Jim Priest — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 23:38:56 +0000

So it’s coming down the pipeline at work that we may be doing some Flex… And of course I know Flexbuilder is built on Eclipse… and Eclipse is cross platform so there must be Linux support! Well, sorta. Seems there is a “Flex Builder Linux alpha 2″. So is that Flex 2? Or 3? I know Linux is a smaller OS segment than the ‘big guys’ but it will be nice when one day software ships on all 3 platforms at the same time.

What’s funny is there are a lot of posts in the Linux Flex forum asking for Adobe to just release a Linux version without the design view. I haven’t played with it yet – but if it’s anything like the Dreamweaver ‘design view’ I could probably live without it too :)

With that minor rant aside, I’m curious if anyone runs the Linux alpha? How stable is it? Or can you run Flexbuilder within a VM? That kind of sucks but if I have to go that route I will…

Forta-fied. Ben Forta Talks Flex/Air

Jim Priest — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:07:24 +0000

Last night I attended Ben Forta’s Flex 3 and AIR Pre-release tour in Raleigh, NC. While I don’t do any Flex/Air stuff at work I still wanted to check things out and I’m glad I did. I was really impressed with both technologies and may have to experiment a bit at home with them…

There was a huge turnout, several local Adobe user groups were there, and I’m guessing there were 60-70 people there at least. Ben spoke for about 3 hours (!) and covered quite a bit. A few things I wrote down:

About 50% of the audience had tried Eclipse as an IDE
The crowd was a mix of ColdFusion, Flex, Flash developers and some designers
For some reason I thought Ben was a Mac person but he was using Vista
Adobe is pushing more and more stuff open source – BlazeDS, Flex 3 SDK, etc!
Ben mentioned Aptana had some support for Flex/Air (mxml)
Flexbuilder for Linux was coming (he said there was a firm date but he wouldn’t tell us)
Air client for Linux was a bit behind but would eventually be in sync with the Win/Mac releases…

Overall it was a great presentation and I hope we can get Ben back here again soon. Maybe to demo the new, free, open source, feature laden Eclipse based ColdFusion IDE (hopefully)!