O’Reilly: Inside RIA

One of the greatest frustrations when building RIAs for mobile browsers such as the iPhone, Safari, Webkit for the Android and Palm, and even IE for Windows Mobile phones is the lack of functional testing tools. Yet if you are making a RIA that is complicated or used for critical work, it behooves you to develop some approach to testing that is not completely manual. Furthermore, if you are serious about performance, you need to make sure your application is working functionally so you can create performance profiles that reflect a solid working application.

Who here has boat loads of dough to drop on functional testing tools? Not many do, especially in these tough economic times. But there is hope! With RIATest 2.0, this powerful product's mission is to bring user interface test automation to the masses with a low cost price point. In this article we take a look at how it works and how you can get started with improving the quality of your software.

Testing code in different browsers helps make your code cleaner because is it is more likely errors will be detected.

In part one of this article, we demonstrated how to create some basic and simple unit tests using Fluint. Those work well for very basic situations, but even an average Flex application will use events and have asynchronous aspects. This article will build on the last and demonstrate how to test systems with these concepts in mind. You will learn to write unit tests that wait for events to occur before continuing and whose success or failure may depend on something that happens sometime in the future.

Software developers are a lazy group of people. It’s true. It’s what makes us good at our job. We have an intrinsic need to find an easier, or at least faster, way to do things. Of course, we also tend to be a stubborn group of people. It’s rare that someone can change our mind, we usually need to experience something ourselves to understand why it matters.

That’s what this series of articles is about. I will tell you the reasons that my team writes tests. I will tell you what we get out of it. However, I will also show you that the barrier to entry is small and that writing tests is something you can try without a big commitment.

Alexei White just released NitobiBug, it's a handy little cross browser logging and object inspector. Think of FireBug but cross browser.

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.