Daniel R.

I'm not sure what I was reading at the time but T. H. White's "The Once and Future King" was mentioned and I ended up adding it to my BookMooch queue. Not long afterwards a copy came available and I mooched it. I remember watching Disney's "The Sword in the Stone" countless times while growing up. Needless to say the book covers much more than that movie could :)

The legend of King Arthur has been told in many forms by many people for some time (as a skim of his Wikipedia page supports). I found White's retelling of it a joy to read. Some of the dialog was best read aloud due to the heavy accents transcribed in text. "Nae doot ye heard of yon. I missed to tell ye in my tale." [442]

Out of the four stories told, "The Sword in the Stone" and "The Ill-Made Knight" I felt were best. "The Candle in the Wind" felt more intellectual and didn't complete the story as satisfactorily as I would have liked. I might have just been hoping for more action. Or maybe I should read his unpublished "The Book of Merlyn".

Tags: books

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 10:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'll been a little quite on the blogging front as of late, besides the occasional user group post. The main reason for that has been the last couple of months I've been heads down doing server side Java development for a cloud computing infrastructure using Amazon's Web Services for S3, EC2, SimpleDB, and CloudFront. All that is the back end for some amazing Flex based applications that Allurent has in the works.

Being back heavy on the server side is a mixed blessing. Its an area I've done a lot of work in, in fact many of my first technically oriented posts on this blog where about Java. As a result I'm not playing with that many new things. The flip side is that I've been able to crank out a bunch of high quality code which feels good. Using Eclipse for Java development has unfortunately made me realize how far Flex Builder has to go to be a truly productive editor. Top three things I'm missing when working on ActionScript and MXML code: code formatting , MXML organize imports, and right-click run as FlexUnit test.

Allurent practices peer review before check in and automated unit testing. In order to make reviews effective we've established a coding standard so that anyone looking at someone else's code won't be distracted by funky formatting. Consistent formatting also makes looking at file differences much easier, eliminating the angry fruit salad only the whitespace changed difference report. Alas, without automated formatting support time gets wasted tabbing and spacing files to keep them readable. Likewise the need to launch an external program and occasionally tweak files to run a single TestCase or method increases the barrier to writing unit tests, which is never a good thing. Thankfully, Flexcover helps us keep tabs on areas we are lacking.

Java does has a big head start on Flex/AS3 for getting the tooling in there. Progress is being made, but for someone coming from the Java/Eclipse world, it's frustrating at times.

Tags: aws eclipse flex ide java tdd

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 9:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith blends elements of Case Histories set in a 1984 like world. The primary story follows Leo on his fall from grace to his betterment of society. Along the way his path intersects a wide cross section of the suppressed society he lives in. The story at times felt like it had been told before, but the author embodies it with a fresh voice that made for easy reading.

Tags: books

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eric Hilfer from Tom Synder Productions is speaking about Flex Automation Framework and automated testing.

Automation Framework: records and playbacks UI events (mouse and keyboard), identifies controls by context to make them less brittle, can read object properties, delegate objects separate automation logic from core component (allows runtime and compile time inclusion).

How it works: Flex includes SWC libraries, compiled as [Mixin] (during compilation the code gets pulled in), Agent then interacts with AutomationManager (can be 3rd party), testing tool communicates with Agent, tests, suites, etc. QA uses tool developer has to expose to Agent.

Good: Smart UI element identification, decouple automation from code, no bloat.
Bad: Not fully AIR-aware (no good support for multiple top-level windows), assumes everything is a UIComponent.
Can programtically detect presence of AutomationManager and behave differently, but not recommended.

Using it: HP QuickTest Pro (expensive, must run in IE browser), RIATest (inexpensive agent) (will be demoing), build your own. Flex Monkey is another alternative.

When you compile your project, include all of the automation SWCs. Alternative is if your application can be loaded just as a SWF, load it into a wrapper that has the automation libraries.

Anything derived from UIComponent will just work. For custom extensions, register with an XML file. Automation name, real classname, events to watch, properties to expose. Delegates register themselves with the AutomationManager for which class they handle.

Making automation easier: Give each button a unique name so that automation can find it even if it is moved. Don't use UIDs.

RIATest demo. Can be run interactively to record tests and setup verifications. Windows native application but can have instances running on other machines reporting to it. Has command line run mode. Scripts supports loops, limited external data file reading.

Customization of "get automationName()". Names can be context unique, doesn't need to be application unique. Need to wrap custom events with automation events (should be placed in delegate object). Need special handling for native window.

XRay Tool very useful for debugging.

Tags: automation flex testing ui

Posted by Daniel Rinehart at 9:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)