joeberkovitz.com

Flexcover Branches Out

joe — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:26:31 +0000

Just dropping a quick note to followers of Flexcover and the ongoing AS3 code coverage adventure. It’s been a super busy time at work for me, but I’ve found enough spare cycles to put together a working branch coverage feature. It’s pretty cool: instead of toting up the number of lines that were executed (and highlighting lines that didn’t run in the source view), it counts “branches” that were executed: every conditional that affects program flow is tracked to count whether it has evaluated false or true, and how many times. In other words, if (a == 1) {…} else {…} counts as two different branches, one for the if clause and one for the else clause. Even better, if (a == 1) {…} also counts as two branches: you will be able to tell if the if clause ever got skipped because a was equal to 1. Try doing that with line coverage! (more…)

David Coletta at Boston Flex Users Group 5/13

joe — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:11:04 +0000

The informative, articulate and personable David Coletta will be speaking about Buzzword’s testing approach at the upcoming Boston Flex Users Group meeting on Tuesday, 5/13 at Adobe Newton’s offices. If you haven’t checked out David’s blog, The Joy Of Flex, well, you really should! He is a great developer and also a great speaker, and this meeting will be one worth attending for sure. You should let the users group know you’re coming by registering at http://bostonfug.eventbrite.com/, so that there will be a slice of hot pizza waiting for you.

Flexcover: A Code Coverage Tool for Flex, AIR and AS3

joe — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:41:09 +0000

I am very pleased to announce the initial experimental release of Flexcover, an open-source code coverage tool suite for Flex, AIR and AS3. The project lives on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/flexcover/.

Here’s a screenshot:

There is so much work left to do on this project, but this release is a start. Rather than wait longer and try to polish it, I felt it was best to get it out there and get some feedback coming in. We’re going to be using it immediately in-house, to be sure — it’s already delivered some valuable news for us on the coverage achieved by our unit test suites!

Finally, a Working AS3 Code Coverage Technique!

joe — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 15:37:30 +0000

[Since this was posted, an initial version of the coverage tool has been put up on Google Code which can be accessed here.]

I’ve been pining for an AS3 code coverage tool for so long, I feel sick. I hate not being able to know how much of my code is actually exercised by test cases, whether automated or manual. So I’ve been playing with an idea on how to get AS3 code coverage working for the last few days and, somewhat to my own amazement, it actually works! Thanks to Adobe’s release of the compiler as an open source distribution, I’ve been able to hack mxmlc to instrument each line of code, adding a call to a global function that logs the line number and the function name.

I invoke the modified compiler on my test program like this (note the additional library for coverage support)

mxmlc.exe -library-path+=../fcov/bin/fcov.swc -coverage src/CoverageTest.mxml
               -output bin/CoverageTest.swf

This generates a special debug version of the SWF that calls a special function in the fcov.swc library. As you can imagine, this piggybacks on the same compiler feature which supports breakpoints. However, the debugger is not involved in any way; there’s no need to run it.

The crude trace log looks like this: (more…)

ItDepends: Code Dependency Analysis For Flex/AIR Applications

joe — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:56:28 +0000

I’m pleased to be able to release a new open source tool to the Flex development community today, that comes out our work at Allurent. The tool is called ItDepends and is located on Google Code. It analyzes the dependencies between classes in a Flex application, using a link report generated by the Flex compiler, and shows this information in an easy-to-use visual browser UI. ItDepends can show you what classes and packages take up the most room in your application and how they depend on each other. It can also show you what results you might achieve by removing classes or partitioning your code into modules, without having to redesign or recompile your application.

It’s written in Adobe AIR of course! I find AIR a nice, productive environment for creating UI-driven tools quickly and easily.

Here are some screen shots. Please see the ItDepends project wiki for more information, and please do download the app and try it out. The UI is kind of clunky, as this tool was kind of a quick hack, but it does get the job done.

Boston Flex Users’ Group ready to spread its wings

joe — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:40:10 +0000

It’s official: at long last, Boston now has its own Flex Users’ Group! The first meeting will be on Tuesday April 8 at 7pm at Adobe Systems’ office in Newton, MA. Peter Farland of the Flex development team will be our first speaker, talking about the new Flex Open Source SDK. Check out the Boston Flex Users Group web page for more information from here on out, about this and subsequent meetings.

I’m really pleased about this. It’s been something that badly needed to happen, given that this is one of the major nexuses (nexi?) of Flex development in the country. A bunch of us Boston types had virtually the same idea at the same time, and since then we have been laboring to bring this users group into the world. I’m excited about the potential for great conversations, new connections and novel things to learn. We’re going to have us a good time, yes we are!

360Flex Presentation Posted

joe — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:16:51 +0000

Thanks to everyone who just attended my presentation at 360 Flex in Atlanta this morning, “Advanced Case Study: Building the Allurent Display Architecture”. For anyone who’s interested (including attendees of my talk of course), you can download it at:

http://www.joeberkovitz.com/presentations/AllurentDisplayCaseStudy.pdf

Heading to Atlanta to Speak at 360Flex

joe — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 14:00:56 +0000

After a far-too-short breather from the last snow-encrusted landing at Logan Airport, I will be flying to Atlanta on Monday to speak at the 360Flex conference Tuesday morning. I really like this conference because it’s small, 100% focused on Flex development and has an extra-congenial, hang-friendly atmosphere.

Many of my speaking topics have to do with architecture, patterns, or some kind of preaching about best engineering practices. I love all that, but, to be completely frank, it feels a bit abstract and windy sometimes. I like to build concrete stuff that does something useful, and that’s where my real interests lie. (”Dammit, captain, I’m an engineer, not a methodologist…”) So this year I’ve made a pact with myself to only do talks about real live projects.

At 360 Flex I’ll be sharing a detailed case study of the architecture and implementation inside the most challenging and interesting product we’ve built at Allurent to date: the Allurent Display Platform. This system includes an engine that visually renders XML markup as Flex components — but unlike MXML or HTML, the markup resolves bindings to nonvisual data objects (usually products or product categories) that can live anywhere in a “virtual namespace” of content. Allurent Display also includes a fully-featured visual authoring tool for this markup similar to Flex Builder Design View.

This talk is a case study, not a product demo: I will be sharing the big decisions we made, the Flex or Flash technologies we used, the implementation tricks we had to resort to, the alternate approaches we considered (maybe the audience will propose something better). I think it’ll be a fun time. Anyway, hope to see you there, if this kind of thing interests you!

Mountain Biking In Mexico’s Copper Canyon

joe — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:12:44 +0000

I just returned from a week-long mountain bike trip in Las Barrancas Del Cobre (Copper Canyon), a canyon system in southwestern Chihuahua state of truly remarkable scope and scenery:

The trip was organized by Western Spirit, a bike expedition company about which I have only great things to say. (more…)

A Single Link for MVCS Resources

joe — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 13:33:55 +0000

A few folks have pointed out that it’s difficult to track down all the resources about my MVCS approach to building Flex applications. They were right, and in response I’ve consolidated everything into a single page accessible at this URL:

http://www.joeberkovitz.com/mvcs.

I’ve also included a few addenda to MVCS reflecting more recent thoughts and practices. As more materials become available, I will add them to the above location.

Thanks to everyone who prodded me into doing the right thing!