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)

The first details of the overarching “themes” for Flex 4 (“Gumbo”) have been posted on the Flex open source wiki. Four themes are listed (“Design in Mind”, “Accelerated Development”, “Horizontal Platform Improvements”, and “Broadening Horizons”) although currently only “Design in Mind” has any details.

And what nice details they are!

Here are a few highlights that stood out to me:

Flex applications however have gained a reputation for looking too similar to each other, as many developers choose to use the Flex default look and feel (known as Halo)…we have found that it remains too challenging to create a truly custom experience. It is therefore a priority for Gumbo to make easy customization of Flex application experiences the norm instead of the exception.

Major features…component and skinning architecture…make it easier to describe experience-oriented features such as states and transitions

Perhaps the most revealing part for existing Flex devs is the aptly named “Caveats and Reassurances” section:

Gumbo will remain compatible with Flex 3…Over multiple releases post-Gumbo we expect to deprecate the Halo model…Halo and new Gumbo components can co-exist…new MXML features may require some changes to your existing markup. However, you can make these decisions on a file-by-file basis

But my favorite line of all is in the “Related Work” section:

Provide a tool in which design-oriented users can easily customize the look of individual components or entire applications. Yes, this is Thermo. We’re not discussing it here.

Of course, this is all fairly in line with what’s been talked about previously, such as Thermo, MXML-G, Ely’s presentation about a new component structure with separation of model and view, etc. But it’s nice to see more information…and what’s not there but is hinted at is even more tantalizing.

I’ll definitely be watching that page for more information about “Design in Mind” and the other Flex 4 themes.

(via email from Matt Chotin — also see the announcement on the Flex team blog)

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)

Last week I posted some of my thoughts on the future of Flex application frameworks, which were my take-aways from the October Silicon valley Flex user’s group (a.k.a. “SilvaFUG”) users group meeting. In that post I strongly recommended watching the recordings of the presentations. The recordings are available now, so once again I highly recommend watching them (now that you actually can watch them =)

Here are the direct links:

• Grant Straker on Moving ZoomFlex from a homegrown framework to Cairngorm
• Ali Mills and Luke Bayes on Flex application frameworks (A great overview of the strengths and weaknesses of various frameworks like Cairngorm etc., from two really smart developers.)

Enjoy!

(via email from SilvaFUG)

Simplified Chaos has an insightful article about deciding when to use AIR and when to stick to browser-based Flash/Flex. His recommendation is to use the browser by default, and only move to AIR if you really need that desktop functionality. His reasoning, which I can agree with, is that people are much less likely to try out a desktop app that they have to install (and probably uninstall later) than to just look at something in a browser. I definitely agree — I hadn’t really realized it until reading this, but I’ve noticed that when I hear about a new AIR app then I always hope the web site has some screenshots or videos of the app in action, so that I don’t have to install it to try it out.

Keith Peters wrote a similar post on the same topic, which I also recommend.

(via Jesse Warden)