What is FlexPMD?

Over the last year or so, I've been leading an internal project at Adobe Technical Services. This project, FlexPMD, is meant to automatically detect code anti-patterns, code smells, common bad practices in a Flash/Flex based source code.

Originally, FlexPMD has been created to automate low-level code audits, so that consultants can focus on higher level architectural issues. It ended up to be rather advanced anti-patterns detector.

More information here

Currently, the project contains 84 rules, like detecting unused or empty pieces of code, complex methods with cyclomatic complexity, misnamed symbols, architectural bad practices like view components referenced from the model, or internal classes accessed from an authorized package, ...

You can find more information here

If you want to check out the entire ruleset, please launch this application, which is also used for exporting
your own ruleset

How to use it

FlexPMD can be invoked from either the command line, Ant, Maven or Mac OSX Automator. An Flash Builder plugin is under consideration.

FInd more information here

Why opensourcing it?
By essence, the ruleset is meant to grow. While Adobe will continue to contribute on the ruleset, we look forward to having the community checking out the source code, and building their own rule, to meet your project/architect requirements.
More info here

The conference will be split into two parts:

1. From 2pm to 5.30pm: Conferences about RIAs seen by several software editors (Adobe and Microsoft) and open source actors. Student projects done with those technologies will be also presented.

2. From 6pm to 8pm: Workshop entitled "RIA or Web 2.0 help modernizing e-governement: Evolution ou Révolution" and concluded, subject to confirmation, by Eric Besson, State Secretary for Prospectives and Evaluation of Public Policies and Internet.

I hope to see you there.

Here is the list of archetypes:
* blazeds-autowired-spring-hibernate-archetype
* flex-cairngorm-stubbed-crud-archetype
* flex-cairngorm-flexunit-archetype
* flex-library-archetype

...

As promised, here is the change list made for this release:

Amongst other features, and a nicer user interface, we also added some features to the API. Ali will publish soon a full release note but here is a sneak peak:
- some assertions have been added to the API, related to regular expressions, and strings.
- some bugs have been fixed.

But the major changes have been on the user interface, helping the developer to easily navigate through the test suite, to identify where his code breaks, why it breaks.

From filtering test cases, by pretty printing the stack trace, to extracting the failure location, this new UI has been built to streamline your daily testing.

If you have any suggestions, feature requests, bug reports, please do it on the FlexUnit forum.

I'm Xavier Agnetti, working as RIA consultant for Adobe Consulting, based in Paris.

I will try to share with you my findings, my thoughts about the work I'm doing on Flex / Air / LCDS / Maven / Agile development.

Be back soon with a lot of posts!