Saturday, September 20, 2008

Darren on Flex: New FlexUnit 0.9 Out!

FlexUnit-0.9 has been released by Adobe Cosulting. I believe this is the first release since the projects move from Google Code to Adobe open Source. I have browsed the source code and nothing seems to have changed; obviously, community, please can correct me if I am wrong. There is still a lingering reference to the flexunit.extensions.TestSetup class which is still nowhere to be seen. Indeed I discovered the update while trying to find the standard approach to test-suite setup and teardown; subquently deciding it is is not the solution to my problem anyway. The most significant change, if only change, is the UI. We have:
  • An active search filter that narrows down the displayed list of test methods, matching on test (method) name.
  • A combobox with three result options: All Results, Empty Tests and Failures & errors; this replaces the tabbed view in the old version.
  • A red cross or green tick indicating the obvious, with a fat red cross or green tick to indicate overall (test-suite) pass or failure; it's a sad day - we've lost our beloved red-bar-green-bar.
  • In the event of an error/failure, improved diagnostic feedback. Just the other day I was getting frustrated with the old version, scrolling through the stack trace to find what class and which line of code I wrote (as opposed to FlexUnit code) that caused the breakage; well, it seems I won't have to suffer that anymore.
Overall, it just looks a lot more charming. Check it out, literally.

2 comments:

SimoneC said...

You are right there aren't a lot of changes in the new versione, the only one that make sense to take in consideration is the new EventfulTestCase, it is very useful when you need to test the events triggered by a component.

What about mocking libraries? the only one that I found is mock-as3 [code.google.com/p/mock-as3/] but it's a real pane to use it because you must create a class that implement all the methods of the interface that you want to mock..

Darren Bishop said...

Yeah true, for some reason I thought EventfulTestCase existed in version 0.85. It is certainly worth a look, especially for negative testing; I do not think the addAsync() helps in such cases.

I have not looked into mocking since 'that' commercial project 2 years ago, when I toyed with rolling my own mocking framework. I'll give mock-as3 a look when I get some time. Cheers