FunFx For Serious Flex Development

I wrote about FunFx last year. After the big Flex 3 and AIR release, I’d like to revisit this great Ruby based Flex testing tool. A serious Flex application needs wired with test harness, period.

FunFX is open-source and uses Ruby to write tests. Ruby is a simple but yet powerful language. People familiar with Ruby on Rails should know the Ruby code is easy to read and what you read is what it does.

FunFX has used Watir, a great testing tool for web applications, as a model on how to write the tests in Ruby.

FunFX is created as a framework that will enable you to drive a Flex application through a web browser. FunFX together with for instance Test::Unit or rSpec creates a great to for testing and asserting the functionality of a Flex application.

Here is what the test script looks like:

require ‘test/unit’
require ‘funfx’

class ButtonTest < Test::Unit::TestCase

def setup
  @ie = Funfx.instance
  @ie.start(true)
  @ie.speed = 1
  @ie.goto(“http://location.of.application”)
end

def test_control
  assert_not_nil(@ie.button(“nameOfButton”))
  @ie.button(“nameOfButton”).click
  assert_equal(“Text”, @ie.label(“nameOfLabel”).text)
  end
end

Recently they released a Flex Test application that is is the Flex Explorer style to show user how exactly the FunFx works. That type of efforts to help out Flex developers really makes me want to give a good try.

All the agile developers know that writing test script is big part of their coding activities, especially if you are into TDD (test driven development) or its variations. I don’t want to see RIA becomes a walled world in its own way. All the RIA technologies should blend into the rest of good ways to develop applications. For that matter, there shouldn’t be such thing as RIA developers. After all, do the end users care about it’s Flex or Silverlight?