The Space For App Developers

I was recently sidetracked by some other activities but I’m back with my research on Flex Developer Tools. Today I wanted to share couple of my findings in MVC & DI (Dependency Injection) frameworks area. Again I’m looking for your feedback with experiences and maybe missing things. As you can see we have 100% Open Source products here. I guess this is similar to testing, mocking and code coverage stuff.

• Cairngorm (Adobe Open Source) – Its a very powerful MVC framework that comes from Adobe, a lot of Adobe Flex/AIR based products especially those built by Adobe Consulting are using this one.

• PureMVC (Open Source) – MVC framework, very famous in this league, interesting that they even ported that to Objective C for iPhone development – cool!!! So now we Flex devs should have easier live there

• Mate (Open Source) – Mate is a tag-based, event-driven Flex framework

• Swiz (Open Source) – Metadata-based Dependency Injection framework, this is my winner, I really love it. In some way it reminds me of Seam Framework from Java/JBoss camp. With simple metadata annotations you can inject your controllers, components, config items etc. It has also metadata driven eventing capabilities, you can annotate event handler methods. Couple of other neat features like command chaining, slick RemoteObject delegate handling…

• Spring ActionScript (Open Source) – DI framework part of SpringSource ,formerly known as Prana Framework. Very much like Spring but for Flex, similar configuration and approach. I think it is a very interesting and worth giving it a test drive…

Here are the link to my previous posts in Flex Developer Tools series:

• Flex Developer Tools – IDEs
• Flex Developer Tools – Testing, Mocking and Code Coverage

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For those of you that didn’t see this info yet AIR has passed 100 million installs, hurray long live AIR This is really amazing number also combining this with great adoption of FP 10 with 55% coverage on computers worldwide!!!

For more info you go here: http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2009/01/air_passes_100_million_install.html

This is extremely cool I finally found it Actually I was thinking about writing it myself. What is it? Not a big thing but as I’m coming from Java world I almost couldn’t live without it, Ctrl+Shift+F/pretty print/flex formatting plugin for Flex Builder. It’s open source and it really works great. You can grab it here.

It has quite a bit of configuration options and for sure everyone can find his style…

To use it you will find to buttons (as below) after installing it in plugins folder but you can assign Ctrl+Shift+F shortcut to run it as well.

NVIDIA is sponsoring Pixel Bender contest, any one willing to share his work done with Pixel Bender should participate. You can win an Alieware Area-51 PC or an NVIDIA graphics card!

For more info check this out: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_pixelbender_contest.html

Some time ago I was writing about how-to use latest Text Layout Framework but this time Mihai Corlan did excellent job and went down into very details, any one interested in TLF should read this one: http://corlan.org/2009/01/19/how-to-use-text-layout-framework-in-flex-32-or-air-15/

This Saturday (24.01.2009) I will be talking about Zend_Amf at Adobers.org Flex User Group in Kraków/Poland. Anyone in the area is invited (maybe if you are visiting Kraków), during the meeting I’m planning to do first public release of my Zend_Amf library that I named Zend_Amf_Ds. I will keep the details about it till Saturday but stay tunned for this on my blog next week

It will take place in one of my most favorite places in Kraków called Pauza that is located on Floriańska 18/3.

More info (in Polish) you can find here: http://adobers.org/wydarzenia/spotkanie-w-styczniu

Last week SapphireSteel released Amethyst Beta 2. It’s a Flex Visual Studio plugin, new release brings couple of improvements but probably the most important feature is IntelliSense support. I believe this is great news for Flex community! In one of my previous blog posts I listed number of different IDE tools of course Amethyst was there. As you can see now you can develop Flex apps with almost any major IDE like: Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ, Visual Studio and FlashDevelop.

I know there are very ambitious plans for Amethyst including WYSIWYG editor, I’m really looking forward to this but as for know you can go and check latest Beta here: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Adobe-Flex-IDE-Amethyst-Beta-2

Another important thing is that you can use Amethyst without full Visual Studio, it can be used with VS Shell, as described here: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Flex-IDE-For-Free-and-Ruby-too

Greg Wilson posted very interesting bits about Tour de Flex. Tour de Flex Rocks! I love it especially when presenting Flex capabilities…

http://gregsramblings.com/2009/01/14/tour-de-flex-whats-coming-in-version-11-and-12/

This is next post of the “Flex Developer Tools” series, this time I’m covering Testing, Mocking and Code Coverage. In this category the winner is Open Source as opposed to IDE category where we have more commercial tools. Again I would like to hear what are your thoughts and experience with these tools, frameworks and libraries.

• FlexUnit (Adobe Open Source) – conceptually based on famous JUnit

• Funit (Open Source) – Metadata Driven Unit Testing for Flex

• asUnit (Open Source) – Unit Testing Framework

• fluint (Open Source) – I never had a chance to use this one but it seems to be very impressing and I’m looking forward to give it a try in my next project. “It provides full support for unit testing in the tradition of FlexUnit, but goes further with richer asynchronous support and support for integration-level testing.”

• FunFX (Open Source) – Cool: “A Ruby tool for functional testing of Adobe Flex applications“

• FlexMonkey (Open Source) – UI testing, capture replay

• Selenium (Open Source) – API for Selenium

• FlashSelenium (Open Source) – Selenium RC Client driver extension

• HP QuickTest Professional (Commercial License) - According to Wikipedia: ” is an automated functional Graphical User Interface (GUI) testing tool created by the HP“. You can also find useful information how to test Flex apps with QTP in Adobe LiveDocs: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/testing_with_QTP_flex3.pdf
  

• mock-as3 (Open Source) – mock object library

• FlexCover (Open Source) – code coverage

Aptana has just released beta version of its ActiveRecord.js which is an ORM JavaScript library that implements ActiveRecord pattern. It also works with AIR and in couple of other environments:

• Google Gears (client-side persistence)
• In Memory (if no SQL server is available on the client)
• Adobe AIR (client-side persistence)
• SQLite and MySQL (via Aptana Jaxer, the open source Ajax server)
• additional environments (like HTML5) expected to come through working with the community on the project

And here is the example:

var User = ActiveRecord.define('users',{
    username: '',
    email: ''
});
User.hasMany('articles');
 
var ryan = User.create({
    username: 'ryan',
    email: 'rjohnson@aptana.com'
});
 
var Article = ActiveRecord.define('articles',{
    name: '',
    body: '',
    user_id: 0
});
Article.belongsTo('user');
 
var a = Article.create({
    name: 'Announcing ActiveRecord.js',
    user_id: ryan.id
});
a.set('name','Announcing ActiveRecord.js!!!');
a.save();
 
a.getUser() == ryan;
ryan.getArticleList()[0] == a;

You can find more info here: http://www.aptana.com/blog/rjohnson/activerecord_js_released_as_beta