O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Elad Elrom is a technical writer, technical lead, and senior Flash engineer. As a technical writer, Elad wrote books covering Flash technologies. He maintains an active blog and has spoken at several conferences regarding the Flash platform. He has helped companies follow the XP and Scrum methodologies to implement popular frameworks, optimize and automate built processors and code review, and follow best practices. Elad has consulted a variety of clients in different fields and sizes, from large corporations such as Viacom, NBC Universal, and Weight Watchers to startups such as MotionBox.com and KickApps.com.

Advanced Flash Tactics or AFTs are techniques that come from deep within the Flash Art Of War, the oldest Flash military treatise in the world. In this AFT I will go over 5 Tips for Unit Testing. Unit Testing and Test Driven Development are a hot topics in the Flash community lately, especially on Twitter. A few weeks ago, after realizing how complex my F*CSS library was getting, I decided to go back and write FlexUnit test for the library in a hope to use TDD moving forward.

We don’t need to be jealous of Java developers anymore. The new version of FlexUnit 4 just got closer in similarity to the JUnit (http://www.junit.org/) project and supports many of the features JUnit has, and more! FlexUnit4 combines features from...

In my previous blog I asked readers to log into the Adobe bug database and vote for an improvement to the Flex Ant Tasks. So far, 16 people have done so. Thank you, whoever you are! The feature request now...

We've already seen how to automate the Java unit tests with TestNG, and in this week’s installment of Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA we're going to automate our Flex tests with Flex Unit and Maven/Ant. Join us Mondays as we finish up our series, Anatomy of an Enterprise Flex RIA.

The concept of unit testing has been around for a long time as part of the traditional Waterfall model of software development. However, it has gained in popular recently as one of the main tenets of Extreme Programming. In Extreme Programming you write unit tests first and then your code. You also refactor code often as you add features. Unit tests help find errors quickly as code is refactored and can be used as part of regression testing to make sure new code has not affected existing functionality.