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Flex applications are reasonably easy to write, and they certainly build themselves a lot faster than standard web applications which need a rich user interface. Testing them is a bit of a problem though. I looked as ASUnit initially, but the whole framework was so Windows-centric that I gave up in disgust. I could tell after a very short time that even if I got it working on my Mac there would be no way to run it in an automated build loop.

After that I started playing with FlexUnit. This framework is much more generic and quite simple to use. The most confusing thing about it is that there seems to be a FlexUnit project on Sourceforge as well as Google code and they don’t appear to have anything to do with each other. I couldn’t make head ‘nor tail of the Sourceforge one but the version on Google code, which appears to have some Adobe support behind it was simple to install and use and this article gives quite detailed instructions about how to use it.

Testing in Flex is still not always that easy, even when you have a reasonably easy to use framework like FlexUnit. You still have to write code which can be unit tested. This is the real value of rigorously testing your code. You have to write your code in such a way as it can be tested. When you do this your code becomes more loosely coupled and more highly decomposed. This leads to not only more testable code, but to more re-usable code…”Vive le testing”

Once you have tests you need a constant integration loop to run your tests and keep you honest. Initially we didn’t think this would be possible, turns out we were wrong. Antennae is an open source project on Google code which addresses exactly this problem. A detailed explanation of how to install and use it can be found in the Flex Cookbook. There is a fair bit of mucking around involved, but with a bit of determination you can reasonably easily get your Flex codebase to build and execute it’s FlexUnit tests in a constant integration loop.