…represents the best features of the FlexUnit project combined with the best features of the Fluint project. It is built on top of a newly created foundation designed to support the latest techniques used in the JUnit testing community, but written for the specific requirements and needs of the Flash Player.

[http://blogs.digitalprimates.net/codeSlinger/index.cfm/2009/5/3/FlexUnit-4-in-360-seconds]

After been working with the Swiz framework for a while now, and been quite fond of the strengths of custom meta-data I was very happy to see the extensive use of the convenient concept. You mark your test cases by [Test]. Instead of overriding setup and teardown methods you can now use the [Before] and [After] metadata. I am very much looking forward to this, and also hope that FlexUnit will contain an improved version of FlexUnitTask for CIServers, like Hudson and TeamCity (which Peter Martin released for the earlier FlexUnit versions).

Read more about FlexUnit4 and see some examples of it in the above link.

I am considering to write a plugin dedicated to Flex application build jobs. Are there any special needs out there, that could be covered by a such plugin?

As the community of twittering people grows really fast, the Twitter Search API is becoming increasingly fascinating. After the Pirate Bay trial you could for example follow the twitterstorm from hour to hour when using the API.

Today I have been trying out the API with a very simple Flex application. It was amazingly easy to set up. By the use of HTPPService I call a couple of JSON formatted services for retrieving popular topics. I used the JSON decoder in the as3corelib. But the decoded object needed some parsing before beeing useful as a dataprovider for my Repeater:

private function parseJSONResult(jsonResult:Object):Array
{
	for (var p1:String in jsonResult)
	{
		for( var p2:String in jsonResult[p1])
		{
			if (jsonResult[p1][p2] is Array)
			{
				return jsonResult[p1][p2] as Array;
			}
		}
	}
	return null;
}

When selecting a topic I also used the HTTPService. In order to resolve the Atom feed I used the resultFormat “e4x” and then declared the namespace:

private namespace atom = "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom";
use namespace atom;

And this is how the app looks like. Right-click on the app and select “view source” if you are interested in the details.

And, by the way, you can always follow my own twitterings on @fsandx.

- an Inversion of Control framework so you don’t end app with any singleton references in your project code but you can wire your objects together using metadata annotation in your classes

- no repetitive folder layouts, and no boilerplate code on your development

As I am currently doing some heavy refactoring of a prototype project in order to take the application to the next level, the above statements really seems promising, and it would have been great if I could have these benefits.

As one of our projects have a focus on home automation, an office automation setup of the project, like this, would be very cool. Very much configurable with Hudson. It lights lava lamps based on the status of the Hudson RSS feed- if the most recent of any builds fails, the red lamp will light; if the most recent of each builds succeeds, the program will light the green lamp.

And, yes, I agree..email noficications are so 90´s!