Blog on Programming

During this Winter holidays, I've been exploring a Behavior Driven Development and experimented with a couple of testing frameworks: Calabash and cucumber-jvm . In this post, I would like to describe setting up cucumber-jvm for Android Studio projects. I've extended cucumber-jvm examples with a version for Android Studio. Here is a copy in my github branch: https://github.com/mdzyuba/cucumber-jvm/tree/add_android_studio_example/examples/android/android-studio/Cukeulator . In addition to the example code, here is some details on how it was created. Dependencies The cucumber-jvm requires several libraries to be added to a project:  https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm/tree/master/android I've found it's easier to add those dependencies with the Android Studio project setup dialog because it takes care of the jar versions for you. File > Project Structure > Modules > app > Dependencies > + > Library dependency   > type "cuc

This is a brief how-to add a Flash on a Google Site. Google Sites allows adding Flash embedded into a Google Gadget. I uploaded a swf file to my Google Site - FlexWebTools and found a gadget that allows displaying any SWF on a Google Site page. It is called AnyFlash. It is pretty easy to use and it worked fine in my Firefox 3.5.5 on Mac OS X 10.5.8. Then I send a link to my site to my friends and they discovered that the SWF was not displayed properly on IE6 and in Firefox on Linux. I reviewed AnyFlash source code and eventually found that there is a bug 939 in the Google Gadget API. Therefore, I created a new gadget that does not use the gadgets.flash.embedFlash() method and works well with Firefox, Safari and IE6 browsers on Mac, Windows and Linux. While working on the gadget, I found a few different ways of embedding Flash into a gadget. Some of them are pretty straightforward like simply pointing to a swf in the context tag. Some are more sophisticated. For instance, they wo

This is a short example that describes an approach on testing a Flex remote data access code with FlexUnit . The access to the remote services in Flex is provided via HTTPService , WebService or RemoteObject classes. The requests to the data services are handled asynchronously. That adds a bit more complexity to the unit testing. In this example, I will share a design idea on how to test a client side of the remote data services. This is something I came up with working on my "pet" project. The "pet" project is a Web application that is based on a three tier architecture: an SQL database, a middleware part implemented with Java, Hibernate, and BlazeDS, and a client tier implemented with Flex. The example shown here works on a client side and tests access to the server-side part of the application. The tests covered in this example are designed to test a user login operation. The login operation is defined on the server-side class called UserService. public class

Here is a quick sample on how to build a simple Flex "hello world" project with Ant. The "hello world" project contains a src folder with one Flex application file and an Ant build.xml file: ./project_home/ ./src/ app.mxml build.xml The app.mxml is the main module of the project. It simply has a label with a "Hello World!" text: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute"> <mx:Label text="Hello World!"/> </mx:Application> Here is the build.xml source: <?xml version="1.0"?> <project name="fx_practice7" default="all"> <!-- Init the build process --> <target name="init" unless="initialized"> <!-- Name of project and version --> <property name="FLEX_HOME" location="/Users/mykola/java/flex"/>

I saw quite a few questions in the forums on how to stress test a Flex application. I thought about it and came up with an idea that I want to share here. I think FlexUnit can be used for stress testing. It is not that difficult. I simply add multiple test runners for each client application and run all of them asynchronously. Here is the example of the FlexUnit runner: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns="*" xmlns:flexunit="flexunit.flexui.*" creationComplete="onCreationComplete()"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ import flexunit.framework.TestSuite; import test.TemperatureConverterTest; import test.ArrayUtilTest; import mx.collections.ArrayCollection; import flexunit.flexui.TestRunnerBase; [Bindable] public var testClients:ArrayCollection; public var NUMBER_OF_TESTS:int = 100; private function onCreationComple

Flex Builder 3 is distributed as an Eclipse plugin and as a standalone IDE. The standalone version does not support Java development out of the box. These couple of blogs helped me to add Java to the standalone version. Adding Java Development Tools to Flex Builder Standalone by Flex Doc Team Adding Subclipse to Flex Builder 3 Standalone by Dan Wilson