January 2009 Archives

Adobe TV now hosts the full MAX 2008 session about Agile Testing of Enterprise RIAs with Flex and LiveCycle ES from Herve Dupriez and me. Herve talks about the LCES part and I about Flex.

This presentation focuses on how your architectural design could look like to make agile testing feasible and efficient. It’s explaining principles we’ve been following at projects that can make Test Driven Development of RIAs a reality.

It also touches upon code coverage tooling available for Flex and its recommended usage. Checkout Flexcover, the open source code coverage tool. Flexcover was created by Joe Berkovitz and some months ago I joined his efforts after I developed an internal tool that followed another approach using only Flash Player APIs. Joe's approach is actually customizing the open source Flex compiler and can therefore achieve object code branch coverage. Join the Flexcover project to keep it going!

During the presentation I’ve mentioned further information about IoC frameworks that my collegue Ed Eustace already put online. Also, Michael Labriola’s presentation at MAX 08 “Testing Flex Applications” spend more time comparing different testing tools. This is not online at Adobe TV yet, but upcoming.

Also check out the presentations from my other colleagues at Adobe Professional Services:

• RIA Development with Cairngorm - Tips from the Experts from Peter Martin and Eric Garza
• Architectural Best Practices for Flex and LiveCycle ES Application from Steven Webster and Tunde Turner
• Television on AIR - Creating Custom Media Player Experiences from Xavi Beumala Segura, John Bennett Kyle Glossy and Mark Hirsch
• Delivering Collaborative Apps with AIR and LiveCycle Data Services from Alistair McLeod and Xavier Agnetti
• Lazy Innovation: Strategy for the Design of Innovative User Experiences from George Neill and Jerome Doran

Imagine an airplane that takes off the ground, flies across a distance and lands at an arbitrary destination. This post will explain how to do the same in Flex, using the Flight effect, which you can download here.

Before I explain any further, take a look at a running example. I've taken the Cairngormstore and added the Flight effect to the point when the user wants to add a product to his shopping cart. Simply click on the "Add to Cart" button to see the effect playing.

The key here is that the product doesn't immediately appear in the shopping cart DataGrid control as the user presses the "Add to Cart" button. Instead, the Flight effect animates the product into the shopping cart control. Download it here.

There’s a slightly updated version of the distortion effects shipping with the amazing Tour de Flex AIR application (flex.org/tour). This update adds another feature that our User Experience team found “adding to reality”. Lighting!

Lighting works on all effects supplied. Here’s how it looks like on CubeRotate:

But see all the effects in action from this example. Download it here directly.