If you take testing seriously as I do, you most likely know test code coverage tools.  And in the Flex Universe the de facto standard is Flex Cover.  Now let’s be honest here, the tool does the job but it isn’t simple.  Using it requires a special compiler to run code on Flex projects, which is the main reason why test code coverage never got into Flexmojos.  The available tool was too complex to use, and so I never gave it any serious thought.

Since day one, Flexmojos has tried to follow the KISS philosophy (Keep It Simple Stupid Smartguy).  With that in mind, Flexmojos is proud to announce state of the art test code coverage support.

How does it work

Flexmojos test code coverage support is extremely easy to use.  You just need to set coverage to true.

Flexmojos uses Apparat - a framework that optimizes ABC, SWC and SWF files.  Apparat allows people to manipulate actionscript bytecode; and instrument flex test code without a custom compiler.  Taking the lead of Apparat author Joa Ebert, who made it possible to instrument the Flexmojos test runner SWF, I made the changes to Flexmojos to collect the code usage flag by Apparat.

Once the code usage information is collected, Flexmojos uses Cobertura to process information and generate reports. This allows Flexmojos to generate html, xml and/or summaryXml. For more on this, click here.

I shoud point out that this feature is only available on Flexmojos 4. So if you never thought about Maven 3, that may be the time.

Sample project

To show how simple it is to enable test code coverage on Flexmojos 4.x, we will edit a Flexunit sample project to enable code coverage. The project can be found here. Once you get the sources, edit pom.xml. There are just two simple changes to make:

1. change the %{flexmojos.version} property to 4.0-SNAPSHOT;
2. add <coverage>true</coverage> to flexmojos configuration section;

Next, running $mvn clean install will produce the following report:

The original report can be found here.

And so, with just a few simple changes you can enable test code coverage on Flexmojos.

On March 18 2008 I checked in the first bits of code for Flexmojos.  Two years later, here we are: Flexmojos now provides first-class support for Flex and AIR development within Apache Maven. It allows for Maven to compile, optimize, and test Flex SWF, Flex SWC, Air SWF and Air SWC and Air files.

We are celebrating this anniversary with a dual release of Flexmojos 3.6 and Flexmojos 4.0-pre-alpha-1.

Flexmojos 3.6 Release

Flexmojos 3.6 most relevant changes:

• Add a new source-view goal which goal produces a syntax highlighted version of the as, mxml and html if they are bundled in a SWF (thanks to Julien Nicoulaud for this contribution)
• Some fixes to Flexbuilder metadata generation
• Add support to Flex SDK 4.0.0.13555 and newer
• Add support for building applications using Flashplayer 10.1 and Air 2.0
• New configuration includeAsClasses for SWC compilation. Wildcard support for includeClasses
• Generator mojo now supports package translation between Java and generated AS3
• Support for granite generator 2.1 (thanks to Kyle Lebel)

For a full list of changes on 3.6, visit this page: https://issues.sonatype.org/browse/FLEXMOJOS/fixforversion/10629

Flexmojos 4.0 Pre Alpha 1

First, Flexmojos 4.0-pre-alpha-1 disclaimer: “IT IS A PRE-ALPHA, use at your own risk.”   Many features available in 3.x are simply not implemented yet, but it also supports many compiler options currently not available in Flexmojos 3.x.

The biggest change in Flexmojos 4.0 vs. Flexmojos 3.x is that we’re starting to use the compiler OEM API and not the OEM wrapper.  Why are we making this change?   The OEM wrapper was seriously out of date, and it was almost impossible to keep up with the latest changes and available options.   By coding directly to the OEM API, we will be able to ship with the latest stable FDK available at release date.   Flexmojos is the first version of Flexmojox that is designed for Maven 3.

Again, Flexmojos 4.0-pre-alpha-1, as the name suggests, IS A PRE-ALPHA. Not destined for production. If you decide to use it – keep in mind it may need patches, bug fixes, breaks some work on backward compatibility.

In summary, it has been a great two years of working on Flexmojos.  We’ve made a difference for developers with Flexmojos, and I hope the next two years are as fruitful as the last two years.

We just cut the 0.5 Edition of the book… Download the PDF or Read the Book Online.

• More readable PDF content. – Typography makes a huge difference to the readability and usability of a text like Maven: The Definitive Guide, and this edition marks a series of editions that are going to focus on bringing the PDF format of this book up to the level of the printed, post-production version of the book. In this release:
  • Font was reduced to 11 point from 14 point. In addition to saving a few trees, this makes the book easier to read.
  • Page margins reduced to 0.3 inches. Again, if you look at an old version of the PDF, you’ll see that the margins were all over the place and the page wasn’t even centered.
  • More sophisticated table layout. As this books develops, I expect it to grow more “useful” tables than we have now. The FlexMojos chapter is full of long reference tables for each plugin goal, and we’re stating to get more sophisticated about table layout in the PDF.
• First Version of FlexMojos Chapter Completed – Chapter 20 covers the FlexMojos plugin and how you can use Apache Maven to compile, document, test, and build Flex applications. FlexMojos just recently had a 3.2.0 release which added more support for unit testing, and the next FlexMojos release 3.3.0 is going to emphasize unit test coverage reports. The first draft of the Flex chapter covers everything you need to know about configuring your development environment for Flex to using the FlexMojos archetype to start a new Flex project in Maven.

Changes in Edition 0.5

The following changes affect the entire book:

The bulk of the changes in the 0.5 release where in the FlexMojos chapter, a chapter which is still in a draft status as the FlexMojos project continues to develop.

Just wanted to give people a heads up. The FlexMojos chapter is going to be the focus of the 0.5 release of the Maven book. I got a quick request yesterday for the most recent documentation for FlexMojos 3.1.0, and it motivated me to spend some time on our Flex chapter. If you are a reader, and you are looking for more documentation, you should know that you have two options to help drive our priorities for the Maven book. You can:

• Give us Feedback using GetSatisfaction, OR
• Create a JIRA Task in the MVNDEF project

GetSatisfaction is a bit more community oriented and personal, while JIRA is more direct. If you are already participating in Sonatype’s open source development effort, you likely already have a JIRA account with us. Whatever you do, don’t hesistate to let us know what documentation you need. We’re listening.

Reading Our Work in Progress

The most recent build from the master branch of the book’s GitHub project is always available here. This version of the book is updated automatically whenever changes are pushed to master. The build process is currently running on a Hudson instance that is not visible to the public, but I have a JIRA task created to move this to the public grid.sonatype.org/ci instance of Hudson. The book build currently takes about 30 minutes (eek!) this is mainly due to the fact that we build all of the languages at once and there are some lingering issues with the lifecycle that cause certain tasks to run twice. Note: The PDF of the staged version of the book is not available, if you download the PDF, you’ll be downloading the released version. (If you really need the PDF of the staged version, you are welcome to build it yourself.

The 0.5 release of the book is in progress. I’d say we have about two or three days between now and the formal release. You can take a look at the remaining issues in our JIRA instance here. What remains for the 0.5 release is some documentation about Flex Unit Testing , Flex Code Coverage Tools, and a few other FlexMojos goodies. Since the 0.4 release earlier this week, we’ve updated the FlexMojos documentation to reflect the latest Flex archetypes and add some essential documentation about configuring your environment for unit testing: here is the latest staged version of Chapter 20

Did I mention that you should really sign up for our Chicago training yet? Because, if I didn’t, I should have.