Adobe Consulting | User Experience Hub

As Flex continues to be adopted by more and more RIA developers, it’s great to see efforts that support developing with the Cairngorm framework (Steven W. has a roundup). For many developers, it makes for an easier transition toward structured MVC architecture and a ‘pattern mindset’ in general. This new eclipse plugin is another one to add to the list.

For a few months now, Luis Lejter has been working on a cool plugin for Eclipse (Flex Builder), and finally I can spread the good word! It’s more than a Cairngorm wizard, and has nice features like ASDoc documentation generators, end-to-end class generators for REST / WSDL / Remoting, and an e4x editor expression builder, to name a few.

Check out the full feature list on his new blog, and the screenshot gallery (running on OSX).

Great stuff, Luis!

Continue reading…

On a recent client engagement, my colleagues and I were challenged with implementing continuous integration on a Flex project. For those unaware or uncertain, continuous integration, as defined by Martin Fowler, is a software development practice where members of a team integrate their work frequently, usually each person integrates at least daily – leading to multiple integrations per day. Each integration is verified by an automated build (including test) to detect integration errors as quickly as possible.

With well written unit tests and automated building (on code check-ins), we were able to produce reliable builds with reduced risk; bugs were spotted sooner and were considerably easier to remove. In addition, continual deployment allowed for QA to get to new features faster, and receiving their feedback earlier in the process made for a very collaborative development cycle.

Paul Barnes-Hoggett has a thorough write up of the process that we followed; it’s a good read, and easy to follow should you decide to implement the same.

Here’s to best practices, stress free development, and quality deployment!

Read the article at eyefodder.com

John Bennett, a Macromedia Consulting Architect, recently published an article covering MC’s Flex Application Starter ToolKit (FAST). Here is an excerpt from the article…

“FAST addresses two fundamental aspects of Flex application development: event logging and data communications. To support event logging, FAST provides an API modeled after Java’s log4j and a Flex-based event display console. For data communications, FAST exposes a simplified programming interface that provides robust error handling, client-side data caching, diagnostic and performance information, and an underlying architecture that supports large applications and facilitates team development.”