Back in November 2005 (yes, 2.5 years ago!) I wrote an article about how data types and type checking work in ActionScript. ActionScript is different than many languages, in that the ActionScript compiler can be used for compile-time type checking (or not), and at runtime it is a strongly typed language, but it also has features of dynamically typed languages. This allows for some flexibility but also means that you have to be careful about testing your code (because the compiler won’t always catch everything).

My conclusion (not original by any means) was that unit testing is an important tool for ActionScript developers. I’ve tried a couple of ActionScript unit testing frameworks (ASUnit and FlexUnit). And finally getting to the point of this post, I was interested to learn today that the crew at Digital Primates is releasing an open source unit testing framework for Flex, known as “dpunit”.

(via Jesse Warden via Twitter)

A couple of months ago at a SilvaFUG meeting I saw a demo of some graph visualization libraries — the kind of thing you use to create a graph showing nodes linked together according to various relationships.

The current “favorite” is the Flex Visual Graph Library (FVGL) Open Source Project.

Their Visual Graph explorer sample gives a nice overview of the functionality that’s available.

Anyway, I forgot to note this earlier, so I’m adding it now, though there’s a good chance this isn’t news to anyone who’s interested in this sort of thing.

(via email from Ted Patrick)

A co-worker and friend of mine, Francis Cheng, recently started a new blog that I wanted to share:

http://blogs.adobe.com/fcheng/

Francis is a former engineer on the Flash Authoring team (and before that, a lawyer). He’s been in his current position on the ActionScript documentation team for several years. He’s also one of Adobe’s representatives on the ECMAScript language committee, so he’s got a better idea than anyone else I know of the internals and future of the core ActionScript language.

So far his posts have been really great if, like me, you’re interested in knowing more about the less-used features of ActionScript and also getting an early look at new features that will probably be in future versions of ActionScript.

If you’re like me and you’ve been heads-down in work or just getting through the pre/post-Christmas season, you may have missed the article “Creating more secure SWF web applications” by Peleus Uhley, that was posted on the Adobe Developer Center on Dec. 20.

In spite of the bad timing, it’s a nice, thorough article that gives a good view of things that we can do to make our apps more secure, in addition to security updates that Adobe continues to make to Flash Player.

(via email from Jeff Swartz)

Tours are starting to be all the rage with Adobe (and others). With the launch of CS3 Adobe did a conference tour, and of course there’s the onAIR bus tour that’s making it’s way around the country promoting AIR.

Now, if you or someone you know is a Flash designer with almost-none-to-basic ActionScript experience, and you want to learn ActionScript from the established master, you can do it for free. Adobe is sponsoring a free, one-day ActionScript training course given by Colin Moock that’s traveling around the U.S. (and eventually the world) starting in October 2007.

They’re calling it “Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0: From the Ground Up Tour.” And you shouldn’t feel intimidated if you are just getting started with ActionScript — the site explicitly says it’s not for advanced developers, so if you’re just getting going (i.e. you’ve done some frame scripts but not anything with classes) you should be in your element.

Currently it looks like there are stops scheduled in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Even if you don’t live in one of those areas, think of it this way — for only the price of travel you’re getting an awesome training experience.

(via Stefan Gruenwedel)