Hamcrest was born in the Java world as the matcher framework in jMock. It was quickly extracted into its own framework and has become somewhat of a monster in the testing world. It’s now included directly in JUnit (since v4.4), and has been ported to many languages (OCHamcrest in Objective-C, Hamcrest-AS3 in Actionscript, PyHamcrest in Python, etc.). Additionally, the matcher concept is generally useful, and Hamcrest is used is lots of different places (my favorite is collection filtering with Hamcrest in LambdaJ).

When writing unit tests, OCHamcrest offers lots of advantages over the vanilla SenTest assertions. First, there’s a ton of matchers that really make life easy, especially when testing collections like NSArray. Second, OCHamcrest matchers are very readable in code, almost self-documenting. Lastly, OCHamcrest automatically provides excellent failure messages when actual is not equal to expected.

Matching Strings

Some string matching examples:

• is – match the complete string
• startsWith – match the beginning of a string
• endsWith – match the end of a string
• containsString – match part of the string
• equalTo – match the complete string
• equalToIgnoringCase – match the complete string but ignore case
• equalToIgnoringWhiteSpace – match the complete string but ignore extra whitespace (new line, tab, or double spaces)

NSString *s = @"FooBar";
 
assertThat(s, is(@"FooBar"));
 
assertThat(s, startsWith(@"Foo"));
assertThat(s, endsWith(@"Bar"));
assertThat(s, containsString(@"oo"));
assertThat(s, equalToIgnoringCase(@"foobar"));
 
assertThat(@" X \n  Y \t\t  Z \n", equalToIgnoringWhiteSpace(@"X Y Z"));

NOTE: Technically, is isn’t really a matcher, it’s a matcher decorator that implicity converts to the equalTo matcher. [thanks Jon!]

Combining Matchers

You can combine multiple matchers with:

• allOf – AND together all matchers
• anyOf – OR togehter all matches

NSString *s = @"FooBar";
 
assertThat(s, allOf(startsWith(@"Foo"), endsWith(@"Bar"), nil));
assertThat(s, anyOf(startsWith(@"Foo"), startsWith(@"Bar"), nil));
assertThat(s, anyOf(endsWith(@"Foo"), endsWith(@"Bar"), nil));

NOTE: The list of matchers must be nil terminated.

You can invert a matcher, or multiple matchers, with:

• isNot – negate the matcher

NSString *s = @"FooBar";
 
assertThat(s, isNot(@"foo"));
assertThat(s, isNot(endsWith(@"Baz")));
assertThat(s, isNot(allOf(startsWith(@"Baz"), endsWith(@"Baz"), nil)));
assertThat(s, isNot(anyOf(startsWith(@"Baz"), startsWith(@"Baz"), nil)));

Matching nil

You can match nil with:

• nilValue() – stands in for nil
• notNilValue() – stands in for !nil

NSObject *o = nil;
assertThat(o, nilValue());
 
NSString *s = @"FooBar";
assertThat(s, notNilValue());

Matching Classes

You can match an instance’s class with:

• instanceOf – match the class

NSString *s = @"FooBar";
assertThat(s, instanceOf([NSString class]));

Matching Numbers

One of the great pains of Objective-C is typing numbers from primitive types to objects and back again. OCHamcrest has a variety of matchers the help make life easy.

• assertThatInt – typed assert that expects an int (other types too: assertThatFloat, assertThatDouble, etc.)
• equalToInt – typed equals that takes an int (other types too: equalToFloat, equalToDouble, equalToBool, etc.)
• closeTo – match a number with a target number plus or minus a delta (both params are double)
• lessThan – match a number less than the given number (param is NSNumber), also lessThanOrEqualTo
• greaterThan – match a number greater than the given number (param is NSNumber), also greaterThanOrEqualTo

assertThatInt(5, equalToInt(5));
assertThatFloat(3.14, equalToFloat(3.14f));
assertThatBool( false, equalToBool(NO) );
 
NSNumber *i = [NSNumber numberWithInt:5];
assertThat(i, equalToInt(5));
assertThat(i, is([NSNumber numberWithInt:5]));
 
NSNumber *f = [NSNumber numberWithFloat:3.14f];
assertThat(f, equalToFloat(3.14f));
assertThat(f, is([NSNumber numberWithFloat:3.14f]));

The easiest cleanest approach is to use assertThatInt with equalToInt, the next best option is to use the vanilla assertThat with equalToInt, the most verbose option is to use NSNumber everywhere.

It’s easy to make rough number comparisons too:

NSNumber *f = [NSNumber numberWithFloat:3.14f];
assertThat(f, closeTo(3.0f, 0.25f));
 
assertThat(f, lessThan([NSNumber numberWithInt:4]));
assertThat(f, greaterThan([NSNumber numberWithInt:3]));

NOTE: It is a little weird, but closeTo takes double params, but everything else expects NSNumber params.

Numeric comparisons also work great on dates too:

NSDate *now = [NSDate date];
 
//now minus 1000 seconds
NSDate *beforeNow = [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:-1000]; 
 
assertThat(now, greaterThan(beforeNow));

Matching Arrays

Easily the best part of OCHamcrest is its ability to match lists of objects. Array matchers are every powerful, but don’t forget to add the terminating nil to all lists.

• hasItem – match if given item appears in the list
• hasItems – match if all given items appear in the list (in any order)
• contains – match exactly the entire array
• containsInAnyOrder – match entire array, but in any order
• hasCountOf – match the size of the array
• empty – match an empty array

Here some basic array examples:

NSArray *a = [NSArray array];
 
assertThat(a, is(empty()));
assertThat(a, hasCountOf(0));

Here some hasItem examples:

NSArray *a = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"a", @"b", @"c", nil];
 
assertThat(a, hasItem(@"a"));
assertThat(a, isNot(hasItem(@"X")));
assertThat(a, hasItem(equalToIgnoringCase(@"A")));

The last matcher may look a little weird, but remember matchers expect a matcher as their input param, and only default to equalTo if none is given. Thus, the first matcher hasItem(@"a") can be rewritten as hasItem(equalTo(@"a")).

We repeat the above example, but this time using numbers in our NSArray. As you can see below, all the number matchers require us to explicitly use equalToInt everywhere:

NSArray *a = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
    [NSNumber numberWithInt:2],
    [NSNumber numberWithInt:3],
    [NSNumber numberWithInt:5],
    nil];
 
assertThat(a, hasItem(equalToInt(2)));
assertThat(a, isNot(hasItem(equalToInt(13))));
 
assertThat(a, contains(equalToInt(2), equalToInt(3), equalToInt(5), nil));

Here are some more complex array matchers:

NSArray *a = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"a", @"b", @"c", nil];
 
assertThat(a, hasItems(@"b", @"a", nil));
 
assertThat(a, contains(@"a", @"b", @"c", nil));
assertThat(a, containsInAnyOrder(@"c", @"b", @"a", nil));
 
assertThat([a componentsJoinedByString:@","], is(@"a,b,c"));

And as I show in the last matcher, you can always dump to a string, and just match strings.

Matching Dictionaries

The dictionary matchers build on the array matchers:

• hasKey – match a key
• hasValue – match a value
• hasEntry – match a key-value pair
• hasEntries – match a list of k-v pairs

NSDictionary *d = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
    @"valA", @"keyA", @"valB", @"keyB", @"valC", @"keyC", nil];
 
assertThat(d, hasCountOf(3));
assertThat(d, isNot(empty()));
 
assertThat(d, hasKey(@"keyA"));
assertThat(d, isNot(hasKey(@"keyX")));
 
assertThat(d, hasValue(@"valA"));
 
assertThat(d, hasEntry(@"keyA", @"valA"));
 
assertThat(d, hasEntries(@"keyA", @"valA", @"keyC", @"valC", nil));

Matcher Error Messages

When a matcher fails, you get a standardize error message of: Expected "foo", but was "bar". This default message is easy to modify by using the describedAs() matcher in place of the typical is() matcher.

NSString *s = @"bar";
 
assertThat(s, is(@"foo"));
//Expected "foo", but was "bar"
 
assertThat(s, describedAs(@"doh! this should be 'foo'", equalTo(@"foo"), nil));
//Expected doh! this should be 'foo', but was "bar"
 
assertThat(s, describedAs(@"doh! this should be foo, %0, %1", equalTo(@"foo"), @"baz", [NSNumber numberWithInt:42], nil));
//Expected doh! this should be foo, "baz", <42>, but was "bar"

NOTE: The argument list for describedAs() MUST end with nil or your tests will crash instantly with no useful error message.

Building a Custom Matcher

Writing your own custom matchers is relatively easy. Here’s an example of a matcher that matches the value of some property on an object:

#import <OCHamcrestIOS/OCHamcrestIOS.h>
#import <objc/objc-api.h>
 
@interface HasProperty : HCBaseMatcher {
    NSString *property;
    id<HCMatcher> valueMatcher;
}
 
+ (id) hasProperty:(NSString *)aProperty value:(id<HCMatcher>)aValueMatcher;
- (id) initWithProperty:(NSString *)aProperty value:(id<HCMatcher>)aValueMatcher;
 
@end
 
OBJC_EXPORT id<HCMatcher> hasProperty(NSString *property, id valueMatcher);

We extends HCBaseMatcher with our custom HasProperty class. We store the name of the property and a value matcher.

And the implementation:

#import "HasProperty.h"
#import <OCHamcrestIOS/HCDescription.h>
#import <OCHamcrestIOS/HCWrapInMatcher.h>
 
@implementation HasProperty
 
+ (id) hasProperty:(NSString *)aProperty value:(id<HCMatcher>)aValueMatcher {
    return [[[self alloc] initWithProperty:aProperty value:aValueMatcher] autorelease];
}
 
- (id) initWithProperty:(NSString *)aProperty value:(id<HCMatcher>)aValueMatcher {
    self = [super init];
    if (self != nil) {
        property = [aProperty copy];
        valueMatcher = [aValueMatcher retain];
    }
    return self;
}
 
- (void) dealloc {
    [property release];
    [valueMatcher release];
    [super dealloc];
}
 
- (BOOL)matches:(id)item {
    SEL propertyGetter = NSSelectorFromString(property);
 
    if ([item respondsToSelector:propertyGetter]) {
        if ([valueMatcher matches:[item performSelector:propertyGetter]])
            return YES;
    }
    return NO;
}
 
- (void) describeTo:(id<HCDescription>)description {
    [[[description appendText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"an object with a property named '%@' with a value of {", property]]
        appendDescriptionOf:valueMatcher]
        appendText:@"}"];
}
@end
 
OBJC_EXPORT id<HCMatcher> hasProperty(NSString *property, id valueMatcher) {
    return [HasProperty hasProperty:property value:HCWrapInMatcher(valueMatcher)];
}

When we write a custom matcher, we must implement two methods, matches: to do the matching and describeTo: to provide feedback in case of match failure. In the above code, we first construct a selector from the given property name, then call the selector to get the actual property value, and finally check if actual matches the expected value (given by the valueMatcher).

Usage looks like this:

Person *p = [Person personWithFirstName:@"Joe" andLastname:@"Doe"];
 
assertThat(p, hasProperty(@"firstName", @"Joe"));

Or more importantly, we can now use our custom hasProperty matcher to match an arrays of objects:

NSArray *a = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:
    [Person personWithFirstName:@"Joe" andLastname:@"Doe"],
    [Person personWithFirstName:@"Joe" andLastname:@"Smith"],
    [Person personWithFirstName:@"Jane" andLastname:@"Allen"],
    nil];
 
assertThat(a, contains(
    hasProperty(@"firstName", @"Joe"),
    hasProperty(@"firstName", @"Joe"),
    hasProperty(@"firstName", @"Jane"),
    nil));

That’s it. Go forth and match.

UPDATE: I put the above hasProperty matcher into a pull request, and Jon Reid accepted it into OCHamcrest v1.6. He even wrote a nice post about it. Get the lastest OCHamcrest from github.

Links

• OCHamcrest – github repo
• OCHamcrest Docs – docs
• Hamcrest – on Java

Teaching was a ton of fun! We wrote some PHP code together and everyone was able to experience a little slice of the joy/hell that is development. We also did a lot of talking, which was fun, too. Since most of the class was non-technical, we didn’t geek out technology stuff, instead we spent a lot of time talking about meta-development. We talked about process, how developers think, how development fits into digital, what it means to actually build something real, etc. I found the whole thing to be very cathartic, having 12 smart people listening to me and participating in a fun discussion was just awesome.

To Be Great

One of the more interesting topics I discussed during class was how to be a great developer. I spend a lot of my time and brainpower thinking about what I can do to be better. That’s the mountaintop, but it’s always a long way away.

Some options for improvement are external but many are internal. For example, I’m always asking myself: Who knows something that I want to know? Who can I model? What can I borrow from those around me? Who can I mentor? Who should I ask to mentor me? What should I learn next? What should I forget? What can I read? Do I need to change my approach? What is today’s definition of value?

I always think my kung-fu is strong, but I’m not a master. So here’s a quick summary of the components of greatness as I see them today. Please feel free to ignore everything as you see fit.

Undying Hunger

If you have the hunger to be better then you’re always on the upslope. And this isn’t the vanilla-level hunger of “Hey, there’s more I could learn.” This is the full on, I’m-starving-more-is-never-enough hunger.

Once upon a time, back when I was a young lad of 10 or so, there was a series of TV commercials asking “Do you see the glass half full or half empty? Blah blah blah” After the hundredth viewing, I turned to my dad and said, “Dad, I see it as not enough! What does that make me?” And in his infinite wisdom, my dad replied, “That makes you a hog!” – which is an apt description without a doubt.

To be great, you need to be a hog.

Effort

Where hunger is internal, effort is external. Where hunger is mostly mental, effort is mostly physical. Effort is all about doing the work, expending the energy, getting really tired, waking up the next day, and doing it all over again. There is an obvious correlation between hunger and effort, but it’s definitely not one of causation. I fully control my decision to turn off the TV and pick up a book or sling some code.

The best thing about effort is that it’s just a switch, and I truly believe that. You can decide for yourself to turn it on any time you want. And with the right carrot, you can even flip the switch on for someone else. In my many years of coaching frisbee, I have repeatedly witnessed the switch being flipped. People can be taught to work hard, but it’s a heck of a lot easier when they are on a team of hard workers.

Unfortunately for me, the effort switch is more of a dimmer switch then an on-off switch. Burning bright and bringing a high level of effort for an extended period of time is hard. Motivation naturally ebbs and flows, and it’s challenging to maintain it. The best solution I’ve found to keep motivation high is to find a partner in crime. When there’s someone else to work with and compete against, it’s much easier to work hard. When I’m on my own, the only trick I have is to maximize variety, some days I work hard by doing some extra reading, some days it’s writing, some days it’s hacking, etc.

Effort in athletics is pretty easy to recognize. It’s spending time in the weight room during the off-season and out-hustling the other guy during the game. Effort in development is a little harder to figure out. Some of my typical outside-of-work adventures include reading (books, blogs), writing (this blog, the occasional article), speaking (local user group), teaching (BDW), and lots of side projects (contribute to open source, silly iPhone apps). There are also quite a few at-work hustle opportunities: you can give a brown bag talk, you can mentor others, and you can be a good mentee (basically you need find someone who knows something you want to know and beg them to teach you). But my favorite thing to do at work is find a like-minded peer and inspire them to work hard. You can do this by co-reading, co-writing, co-speaking, pair programming, etc.

To be great, you must work hard, constantly.

Creative & Pedantic

Unfortunately, no matter how hungry you are or how hard you work, you must also be creative to be a great programmer. Without creativity, you will forever be a cog in the machine. You might be the best cog ever, but you are a cog none the less. In Hackers & Painters², Paul Graham talks a lot about the creative nature of software construction. Hackers, painters, architects, and writers are all makers in Paul’s world, and he spends quite a bit of prose comparing them.

I really like Paul’s take on the process of construction, and the different disciplines that practice it, but I try to take a more practical view. To me, creativity is nothing more than a measure of one’s ability to escape the box. I see it as just another skill that can be learned, practiced, and improved. Over time, you can learn to recognize the box faster and more fully. The more boxes you see, and solve, the more solution patterns you will remember. Eventually, you will develop a toolbox of escape tactics.

Again, it’s still not enough. No amount of creativity will help you actually implement a solution to any given box. There are a lot of details that are critically important to the construction process. Paul Graham writes, “In both painting and hacking there are some tasks that are terrifyingly ambitious, and others that are comfortingly routine.” Much like Superman has Bizarro, the creativity has pedanticalness (yes that’s a word). Many of the routine tasks in programming are routine to the point of being tedious.

I often liken the pedantic aspect of development to licking envelopes. It’s easy, but yuck! Who actually likes the taste of envelopes? If you don’t do it right, then don’t be surprised if you mail explodes while in transit. In my experience, there are a multitude of development tasks that taste a heck of a lot like envelope glue, but you don’t really have much choice. You can either do them the right way, or watch them explode.

To be great, you must embrace both the creative side of development and the pedantic side.

Ego

The number one, most important, aspect of greatness is ego. The truth of development is that not everything goes your way. And even when it does, it can be exceedingly difficult. For all those times when you are tumbling down the mountain, you need a certain amount of ego to arrest your fall and start upwards again. I’ve actually spent time and effort into stroking my own ego for this simple reason: you learn more when you lose than when you win.

I heard a pretty amazing football stat the other day. In 9 of the last 10 seasons in the NFL, at least one last place division team fought their way to first place in their division the following year. Most recently, the Saints finished 8-8 in 2008 and were in last place in the NFC South. In 2009, they won their division at 13-3 and went on to win the Superbowl. Why? Because you learn more when you lose than when you win. Fact.

The mud is a great teacher. But you must have a certain level of mental fortitude to climb out and get clean again. To me ego is just that – confidence in yourself and your ability, lack of fear, and a basic mental toughness. I’ll go willingly into the mud to take on a difficult problem or learn a new language (or maybe a new API instead of another language). And if I get thrown into the mud unexpectedly, which happens all the time in consulting, there won’t be any fear or panic.

Do I get dirty? Hell yes. Does it stink? Of course. Having confidence in yourself and believing in your abilities doesn’t magically transform the metaphoric mud into flowers, it’s still mud.

To be great, you must be confident and fearless.

Conclusion

It’s hard to know what you don’t know. In fact, it’s really damn hard. But I don’t find it discouraging in the least to know the code I write today is going to suck compared to the code I write tomorrow. That’s called progress.

I feel good when I focus on what I do know. I know I want to be the best dad I can be, the best husband I can be, and the best developer I can be. And today, that means this:

• undying hunger — more is never enough
• effort — constantly work hard
• creative & pedantic — embrace both sides, writing elegant algorithms and head-pounding debugging
• ego — be confident in yourself

So stay hungry, work your ass off, lick your envelopes, and welcome the mud at every opportunity. Good luck.

“And whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.” — Martin Luther King, Jr ³

Footnotes

1. I’d like to thank BDW’s First 12 for listening to a crazy opinionated developer. @botvinick, @kygalle, @dasn101, @tetonmarketing, @jefferyjake, @justinmccammon, @rosErin, @JadedSkipping, @hseal, @tegoenfuego, @dviens, @ndubsglobal
2. Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham
3. I’ve Been to the Mountaintop by Martin Luther King, Jr. This speech was given on April 3, 1968.

Alas, flash is opaque to analytics. We have no idea what our users are doing inside the AIR Install Badge application. Are they installing? Or upgrading? No problem, we just need to write some code…

The Code

Using flash’s ExternalInterface, we can manually push the data out of flash and into javascript. Once we have the data in javascript, we have total control. One option is to use google analytics to store our badge data. In the case of FlexMonkey, we send the badge data along with the user’s credentials to our CRM platform, SalesForce.com.

Step 1: First, open AIRInstallBadge.as and add this to the top:

import flash.external.ExternalInterface;

Step 2: Next, add the ExternalInterface call to the top of the handleActinClick() function in AIRInstallBadge.as:

protected function handleActionClick(evt:MouseEvent):void {
    if (action == 'install' || action == 'upgrade') {
        //send data to js
        ExternalInterface.call('badgeJS',action);
    }
    ...
}

Since I only care about the install or upgrade actions, I’ll only send those out to javascript. Re-compile the badge and deploy.

Step 3: Last, add the badgeJS() javascript callback to the page containing the badge and do whatever you want with the incoming badge data:

function badgeJS(action) {
    //do metrics here...
    alert('badge action=' + action);
}

Conclusion

With an hour of effort, and a very small amount of code, we’ve managed to get the useful metrics of installs and upgrades out of the AIR Install Badge and into our analytics engine of choice. A job well done.

After further reflection, I still agree with what I said and my conclusions. Moving forward, I plan to learn fewer languages and less syntax. My daily pain is that too much of my knowledge is too tightly bound to the implementation details, and when I switch languages I can’t bring my solutions to bear. It sucks, and it makes me feel stupid. So the simple fix is to put my energy into learning more unbound concepts (like my soft skills of speaking and writing) and more easily transferable concepts (like APIs).

Analytics

I had a huge bump in traffic mostly due to Reddit and DZone that basically crushed my regular traffic down into the noise. My poor slice at Slicehost was taking a beating, so I quickly installed the Hyper Cache plugin. It’s dead simple and it really works. On Sunday morning, my load went from 0.2 to 0.02 instantly.

I also tracked my twitter analytics via bit.ly. As a side note, you can just put a plus “+” at the end of any bit.ly url to see it’s analytics. So, since the original post was shortened to http://bit.ly/cR6cnY, the analytics are available here: http://bit.ly/cR6cnY+.

Commentary

Lots of stuff was said, but I just wanted to touch on some of the key points.

1. I feel your pain – thanks. I find it comforting to know I’m not alone.
2. definition of schizophrenia – a couple of comments mentioned that my post had nothing to do with schizophrenia. First, I suggest you look it up: “contradictory or antagonistic qualities or attitudes”. My Erland knowledge is definitely in opposition with my Java, which is in opposition with my Actionscript, etc. If you don’t have this problem, good on you. Second, there’s thing called artistic license and if you are a writer you get to use it. I picked a sensational word for a reason. I welcome criticism of the choice, but it’s silly to take umbrage with its validity.
3. short sighted – my plan was called out as short sighted a couple of times. I tend to think of life and plans like this… There are three choices when it comes to plans. First, you can have no plan, and just drift along. Sometimes you get smashed into the rocks, and other times you wash up on a tropical paradise with beer, virgins, and fiber broadband. Second, you can have a short term plan that gets revisited and revised as things change. Third, you can have a short term plan, but be so unbelievably naive that you think it is actually some awesome long term plan. Life is agile. All plans are short term.
4. embrace and extend – a few people said don’t fight it and embrace the insanity. I really lust after new stuff, so it was easy to try to the embrace-the-insanity method first. Alas, it didn’t work out and I think it actually made matters worse. Thus, I decided to go with a new plan to fight against the insanity.
5. python – a couple people mentioned I should switch to python. Yes I’ve written many thousands of lines of python, but none in 2010 so far.

Thanks for reading. As always, I love feedback.

Being insane really sucks. But I’ve got a plan to get back on track. First, I’ll dole out some blame. Then, I’ll give a little background. Next, I’ll really dig into my current insanity. And finally, I’ll layout my plan for the future.

The Blame

I like to curse. And when I’m mad, I find it definitely helps to calm the rage. So to begin, I’d like to give a big fuck you to Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the pragmatic programmers. I love you guys but you get at least some of the blame for making me insane. Next, I’d like to give some blame to my wonderful employer, Gorilla Logic, and their penchant for landing such a diverse set of inspiring projects. You suck for building a candy store and filling it with the sweetest treats.

Unfortunately for me, the lion’s share of the blame is mine and mine alone. I’m insane today because of my lust for the new coupled with my desire to be great. I want to be a great dad, a great husband, and a great employee. Who wants to be average?

It’s just not possible that I’m alone. Who doesn’t like cool new stuff? Who doesn’t want to be great? There must be thousands, if not tens of thousands, of fellow developers suffering from insanity that goes undiagnosed. So this tale goes out to you, my functionally insane brethren. Together we can heal ourselves.

Who Am I?

I’d like to give a little background before I get in too deep with my current insanity. I’m a developer. I get paid to write code (woo hoo!) to solve problems. Blah, blah, blah, if you just fill in the rest with a bunch of geek stereotypes you won’t be far off. Yes, I like to IM my coworkers instead of just walking over and talking with them. Yes, I read slashdot. Yes, I read sci-fi. Yes, I played lots of Dungeons & Dragons.² Et cetera…

I consider myself a smart guy, just like every single developer I’ve ever met. I stay hungry and motivated to learn something new every day, every week, every year. Thanks to Andy and Dave, I learn one new language every year. And most importantly, I try very hard to listen or at least listen more than I argue. Sometimes it doesn’t work out so well, but that’s another tale…

How I Became Insane

I’m a big fan of “right tool for the job” in both life and development. In the realm of development, the concept of right tool for the job has metamorphosized into right language for the job, aka polyglot programming. On the face of it, polyglot programming has a lot of advantages (here’s a good talk by Dean Wampler), but it is one of the root causes of my insanity.

At Gorilla Logic, we are regular practitioners of polyglot programming. Our typical enterprise RIA project uses Java on the backend and Flex on the frontend. Of course, the mix of languages doesn’t stop there. I develop for the web, so when you talk about websites, WordPress and Drupal are immediately in the conversation, and thus PHP. And since a rich client-side experience is critically important, HTML, CSS, and Javascript are drawn into the mix. In the mobile world, Blackberry and Android are thankfully mostly Java, but anything Apple takes me into the non-GC’d world of Objective-C.

I’ve also been diligently learning my one language a year for a while now. And when you combine that with work, it has simply become too much. I’ve become scattered, my mind has become messy. Looking at the syntax level, the symptoms are acute. I can’t write a loop. I can’t match a pattern. I can’t build array operations. My context switching pain is severe, it can literally take hours before I get back up to speed with the language at hand.

But it’s not just the low-level stuff anymore. I’m finding that even at the highest levels of architecture, clean thought is hard to achieve. Different languages tend to espouse different patterns and paradigms that directly impact architecture level decisions. For example, if I wanted to write a server in PHP I might consider using OS support like fork and cron. In Java, I’m off in thread land. Erlang it’s processing and messaging. Scala is all about actors.

I find myself mixing paradigms and doing stupid stuff, like trying to fake Erlang’s message passing in PHP by multiple scripts communicating by repeatedly touching rows in a database. Dumb, but becoming harder to avoid as everything slowly bleeds together in my mind. I’m in the mud and I desperately what to be clean again.

My Current Insanity

Here’s a broad sample of what I’ve done lately (as in the last month or so) for work and personal projects:

Erlang – Work

Freshened my Erlang, wrote a sample custom module for ejabberd, played with Nitrogen.

Flex/AS3 – Work

I helped out a little bit with FlexMonkey 1.0, including the fuzzy pixel bitmap comparison support.

Flex/AS3 – Work

ScrumMonkey is another Gorilla Logic open-source project. I upgraded everything to work with Flex 4 and LCDS 3.0.

Java – Work

Fun with Spring, Hibernate, and Spring Actionscript. Can’t say any more about the project.

Javascript – Work

I helped develop FlexMonkium, a Selenium-to-FlexMonkey testing tool that enabled automated functional testing of hybrid web apps. I used Javascript and XUL.

Objective-C – Justin

Wrote and published a US states and capitals memorization helper app. Read more or get it from the app store.

Objective-C – Work

iPhone and iPad. Cool stuff. Can’t talk about it yet.

PHP – Justin

Released Viceroy, a one-column WordPress theme with a dash of pink.

PHP – Work

We needed to get our community feedback out of Google Groups and into our FlexMonkey Forum. I wrote a simple scrapper in PHP and blogged about it.

PHP – Justin

Various WordPress and Drupal side projects just for fun.

Ant, Maven, Bash, Rake – Work & Justin

Scripted a bunch of stuff…

And that’s just my current insanity: the languages that I’ve touched lately. But I’m not special! At least, not in this case. The list is similar for many co-workers, and many of my friends that are web developers.

The Sensible Plan

If I’m to blame, then I’ve got to be the one to fix it. So here’s my plan:

• Forget one language every year – Forget the syntax, forget the weirdness, and forget the whole ecosystem (frameworks, tools, community). Say goodbye and don’t look back. But before you leave a language behind, pick one core concept, one of the things the language does right, and take that with you. For example, when I forget Erlang, I’ll take the concept of concurrent programming with me. So I’ll remember stuff like immutability, message passing, and processes. When I forget Ruby, I’ll take DSLs with me. Ruby does lots of stuff well, like blocks, mixins, terse syntax, and meta-programming, but I always enjoyed using all the great DSLs the best, so that’s what I’ll remember.
• Don’t learn one programming language every year – Yep, I’m going against Andy & Dave. So no Haskel, Clojure, Duby, Go, or Reia for me this year. I’m obviously feeling a little full on languages right now, so I’ll take a break for a few years.
• Learn one or more APIs every year – Since Web 3.0 is all about APIs, I might as well spend some time learning more of them. The big boys are obvious: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Maps, but there are plenty more that are really interesting. From the practical side, every single web project either integrates with other APIs, wants their own API, or has some set of requirements that force a good SOA architecture (aka some internal set of APIs).
• Upgrade my soft skills – Slinging code is fun, but it can’t be the only thing I do if I want to be a great employee. So instead of picking up all these little bits of shiny tech, I’m going to going to focus my lust for the new on upgrading my soft skills. I write this blog to improve my writing, but I haven’t spoken at a big conference since CLEO/QELS in 1999 and I was really bad. So I hope to do some public speaking in 2010.

Basically, I’m hoping to elevate my kung-fu by going for more depth of knowledge. Then, I’ll do my best to control the relentless expansion of breadth. New and shiny is no longer sufficient. Talking things through with co-workers and writing this post is a great first step into the future. I’m already feeling optimistic about my path.

Footnotes

1. I’m not really insane, at least I don’t think so. I’m just functionally insane. For a glimpse into the mind of a real schizophrenic, I highly recommend Is There No Place On Earth For Me? by Susan Sheehan. It won the non-fiction pulitzer prize in 1983, so it’s a little bit dated now, but an unimaginable story.
2. Actually, my friends and I played a lot of Rolemaster (wikipedia) and Champions (wikipedia) which are superior role playing games. If you are a true fan, you’ll understand. If not, the image of boys with dice conjured by Dungeons & Dragons is a good takeaway.

UPDATE: I wrote a follow-up post to address all the great feedback: Schizophrenic Following

With a very minimal amount of PHP, I was able to walk the entire FlexMonkey Google Group, scrap all the topics (aka threads) and all the posts inside each thread. The first step was to build a generic scraper class that grabs an html page (using cURL) and parses out all unique outbound links.

Here’s the code for the Scraper class:

class Scraper {
    private $url = '';
    public $html = '';
    public $links = array();
 
    public function __construct($url) {
        $this->url = $url;
    }
 
    public function run() {
        $this->html = '';
        $this->links = array();
 
        //scrape url & store html
        $ch = curl_init();
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $this->url);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
        curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
        $this->html = curl_exec($ch);
        curl_close($ch);
 
         //parse html for all links
        $matches = array();
        preg_match_all('#<a.*?href\s*=\s*"(.*?)".*?>(.*?)</a>#i', $this->html, $matches);
 
        if ($matches !== false && count($matches) == 3) {
            for ($i = 0; $i < count($matches[1]); $i++) {
                $href = $matches[1][$i];
                $val = $matches[2][$i];
 
                //unique links
                if (!array_key_exists($href, $this->links)) {
                    $this->links[$href] = $val;
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

In the run() method, cURL is used to grab the html. Next, a regular expression is used to match all outbound links. The links are are stored in a hash, while making sure they point to unique urls.

Built on top of the generic Scraper class is a specialized Google Groups scraper class, aptly named GoogleGroupsScraper. For a given Google Group, the url of the main page (containing a list of most recent topics) is:

http://groups.google.com/group/[GROUP]/topics

And the url of a single topic (aka thread) is:

http://groups.google.com/group/[GROUP]/browse_thread/thread/[THEAD_ID]#

Where [GROUP] is the name of the Google Group, and [THREAD_ID] is some alphanumeric id. Most importantly, at the bottom of the main page is an Older » link that points to the next page of topics. The GoogleGroupsScraper exploits this to spider the entire group, recording topic title and topic url as it walks each page.

Next, each individual topic page is scraped by the GoogleGroupsTopicScraper class and parsed into a list of posts with author name, date, timestamp, etc. The topic scraper uses various regular expressions to extract and massage the html to extract the different parts of each post. In particular, the post body needs a lots of work to strip out any Google Groups specific links and code.

Lastly, the topics and their posts are assembled into an XML document with a nice big CDATA block around the post body to preserve the html content.

Here’s some sample output from the scraper:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<scrape group="flexmonkey">
  <topic>
    <title>FlexMonkey User Group is now located at www.gorillalogic.com/flexmonkey!</title>
    <link>http://groups.google.com/group/flexmonkey/browse_thread/thread/fe9ed66bf56db88e#</link>
    <posts>
      <post idx="0">
        <author>Stu</author>
        <email>stu.st...@gorillalogic.com</email>
        <date>February 10, 2010 21:17:52 UTC</date>
        <timestamp>1265836672</timestamp>
        <body>
<![CDATA[
<p>People of FlexMonkey, <p>We have migrated the FlexMonkey discussion forum to <a href="http://www.gorillalogic.com/flexmonkey">http://www.gorillalogic.com/flexmonkey</a>. Please note that you will need to re-subscribe to the new forum to continue receiving FlexMonkey discussion messages. <p>-Stu <br>
]]>
        </body>
      </post>
    </posts>
  </topic>
  <topic>
    <title>Record button clicks based on Ids instead of names?</title>
    <link>http://groups.google.com/group/flexmonkey/browse_thread/thread/4f079b1959374f53#</link>
    <posts>
      <post idx="0">
        <author>Shilpa</author>
        <email>shilpa.g...@gmail.com</email>
        <date>February 9, 2010 23:44:44 UTC</date>
        <timestamp>1265759084</timestamp>
        <body>...</body>
      </post>
      <post idx="1">
        <author>Shilpa</author>
        <email>shilpa.g...@gmail.com</email>
        <date>February 10, 2010 00:05:44 UTC</date>
        <timestamp>1265760344</timestamp>
        <body>...</body>
      </post>
      <post idx="2">
        <author>Gokuldas K Pillai</author>
        <email>gokul...@gmail.com</email>
        <date>February 10, 2010 00:16:34 UTC</date>
        <timestamp>1265760994</timestamp>
        <body>...</body>
      </post>
      <post idx="3">
        <author>Shilpa</author>
        <email>shilpa.g...@gmail.com</email>
        <date>February 10, 2010 01:18:42 UTC</date>
        <timestamp>1265764722</timestamp>
        <body>...</body>
      </post>
...

Finally, there is a very simple PHP driver for the scraper that runs the scraping process:

require_once('GoogleGroupsScraper.class.php');
 
$scraper = new GoogleGroupsScraper('[GROUP]');
$scraper->run();
 
print $scraper->getXML();

And you run it as usual:

php scrape.php > output.xml

Just enter the name of the Google Group you wish to scrap, and away you go. Here are a couple of notes to help you along:

1. [GROUP] is the group name as it appears in the url, so no spaces, etc.
2. It’s not fast, so be patient, or modify the scraper code to generate some intermediate output.
3. Via a browser, Google Group displays 30 topics per page, but via PHP & cURL you only get 10. Probably some Cookie or User Agent magic going on.
4. Not much error handling. The error handling that exists isn’t very good. It will break.
5. Good luck!

Please download the code and use it however you wish. Hopefully, putting the code online and writing this post will save someone else some time when migrating data off Google Groups.

Files

• GoogleGroupsScraper.tgz

Setup Modeler Plugin

1. Get Flash Builder 4 Beta (download)
2. Get the LCDS Modeler plugin (download)
3. Install the Modeler plugin:
   • Unzip to a temp folder, which will create a plugins folder
   • Copy the plugins folder’s contents directly into Flash Builder’s plugins folder (typically located in /Applications/Adobe Flash Builder Beta/plugins if you are on a Mac)
   • Restart Flash Builder

Model Driven Development

1. Create a new Flex project
   • In Flash Builder, right-click and say New > Flex Project
     
     enlarge
   • Choose J2EE for Application Server Type, and select LCDS
   • Click Next to configure your server
     
     enlarge
   • Uncheck Use Default Location, and fill in your root folder, url, and context (see screenshot)
   • Click Validate Configuration (this will fail if LCDS is not running), and then Finish
2. Create a new data model
   • Select the Data/Services tab in the bottom window
   • Click the Edit Active Data Model icon in the tab’s menubar (see screenshot)
     
     enlarge
   • This will create a new data model for your project, and bring up MyApp.fml in the Modeler’s design view (see screenshot)
   • To see the file in the Package Explorer, click the Filters icon (see screenshot), then uncheck .* and .model
3. Connect to the server
   • Switch to the Adobe Data Model perspective
   • In the RDS Dataview window, click the RDS Configuration icon
     
     enlarge
   • Set the Context Root to myapp (because our server is running at http://localhost:8080/myapp/)
   • Click Test Connection, and then OK
4. Verify the server’s connection to MySQL
   • In the RDS Dataview window, expand until we can see our tables
     
     enlarge
   • Right-click on a table, and select Show Table Contents
     
     enlarge
5. Edit the model
   • Just drag tables from the RDS Dataview to add them to the model
     
     enlarge
6. Browse the generated services and code
   • Once the model is updated, the builder automatically generates standard CRUD services. Switch back to the Flash Builder perspective, and you can view them in the Data/Services tab
     
     enlarge
   • The generated code is available in the Package Explorer. Files you don’t want to touch are prefixed with an underscore. The other files, like Player.as and PlayerService.as are available for you to customize.
     
     enlarge

More Docs

1. LCDS Modeler Guide (zip)

Conclusion

Once again, that’s it. I’ll have to learn something new about LCDS before I write more.

Now on to the fun part: playing with our new toy. Vroom, vroom! In Part 1, I’ll walk through getting started with LCDS sitting on top of MySQL. Part 2 covers using the Modeler plugin in Flash Builder 4 to bring the dream of model driven development to reality.

NOTE: This article was written for LCDS 3 Beta 1, but I assume it’s mostly relevant for Beta 3 (released at AdobeMAX) and all future versions of LCDS 3.

NOTE 2: The Mac installer for Beta 3 (released at AdobeMAX) does not included the integrated Tomcat which is a huge pain in the ass for all Mac developers. I recommend you grab the integrated Tomcat out of the Windows installer.

Setup MySQL

1. Install & start MySQL (this is an exercise for the reader, I remember it being a little painful on my Mac)
2. Create a new db & user:
   • mysql -uroot -p

     CREATE DATABASE mydb;
     CREATE USER 'myusr'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword';
     GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mydb.* TO myusr@localhost;

     NOTE: Don’t use user in any part of a username (ex: myuser doesn’t work) because it is a reserved word in MySQL.

3. Create some sample tables:
   • mysql -umyusr -pmypassword mydb

     DROP TABLE IF EXISTS team;
     CREATE TABLE team (
       id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
       name VARCHAR(150),
       PRIMARY KEY (id)
     );
      
     DROP TABLE IF EXISTS player;
     CREATE TABLE player (
       id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
       name VARCHAR(150),
       NUMBER INT NOT NULL,
       salary INT NOT NULL,
       team_id INT NOT NULL,
       PRIMARY KEY (id)
     );

4. Insert data:

   • INSERT INTO team (name) VALUES ("Denver Broncos");
     INSERT INTO team (name) VALUES ("Oakland Raiders");
      
     INSERT INTO player (name,NUMBER,salary,team_id) VALUES ("Jay Cutler", 6, 6497500, 1);
     INSERT INTO player (name,NUMBER,salary,team_id) VALUES ("Champ Bailey", 24, 8003050, 1);
     INSERT INTO player (name,NUMBER,salary,team_id) VALUES ("Eddie Royal", 19, 2539830, 1);
     INSERT INTO player (name,NUMBER,salary,team_id) VALUES ("Tony Scheffler", 88, 612480, 1);
     INSERT INTO player (name,NUMBER,salary,team_id) VALUES ("JaMarcus Russell", 2, 16872400, 2);
     INSERT INTO player (name,NUMBER,salary,team_id) VALUES ("Darren McFadden", 20, 4375000, 2);
     INSERT INTO player (name,NUMBER,salary,team_id) VALUES ("Sebastian Janikowski", 11, 2625000, 2);

     NOTE: Ignore the fact that Jay Cutler now plays for Da Bears.

Digging Deeper: Setting up a database is required, but setting up tables or inserting data is not. You can use the model driven development features of LCDS (and the Modeler plugin) to create all of your tables and data.

Setup LCDS

1. Grab LCDS 3 Beta from Adobe Labs (download)
2. Run installer & choose to install with bundled Tomcat (on Mac this installs to /Applications/lcds and the bundled Tomcat to /Applications/lcds/tomcat)
3. Create a new LCDS app, by copying the template app (in lcds/tomcat/webapps/lcds) to a new folder:
   • cd /Applications/lcds/tomcat/webapps
   • cp -R lcds myapp
4. Enable RDS (Remove Dev Services) – This enables some dev only stuff like updating the database tables on the server directly from Flash Builder. For obvious security reasons, RDS would never be running in a production environment.
   • Edit /Applications/lcds/tomcat/webapps/myapp/WEB-INF/web.xml
   • Uncomment the entire RDS section
   • Set userAppserverSecurity = false (in the newly uncommented RDS section)
5. Update services-config.xml to avoid collisions with template lcds app:
   • cd /Applications/lcds/tomcat/webapps/myapp/WEB-INF/flex
   • Edit services-config.xml:
     • In the <channel-definition id="my-rtmp"> section, change port 2038 to port 2039
     • In the <channel-definition id="my-nio-amf"> section, change port 2880 to port 2881
     • In the <channel-definition id="my-nio-amf-poll"> section, change port 2880 to port 2881
     • In the <channel-definition id="my-nio-http"> section, change port 2880 to port 2881

   NOTE: As an alternative, you can just remove the template lcds app and skip the collision avoidance stuff above.

Setup LCDS to talk to MySQL

1. Get MySQL Connector/J, and be sure to match the version to your MySQL version (download)
2. Put mysql-connector-java-5.1.7-bin.jar into Tomcat’s lib folder:
   • cp mysql-connector-java-5.1.7-bin.jar /Applications/lcds/tomcat/lib/
3. Config Tomcat to recognize your MySQL db by creating a new Context for your app:
   • cd /Applications/lcds/tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost
   • cp lcds.xml myapp.xml
   • Add a JDBC Resource block to myapp.xml, so it looks like this:

     <Context privileged="true" antiResourceLocking="false" antiJARLocking="false" reloadable="true">
         <!-- JOTM -->
         <Transaction factory="org.objectweb.jotm.UserTransactionFactory" jotm.timeout="60"/>
      
         <!-- MySQL -->
         <Resource name="jdbc/MyDB" auth="Container" type="javax.sql.DataSource"
             maxActive="100" maxIdle="30" maxWait="10000"
             username="myusr" password="mypassword"
             driverClassName="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"
             url="jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/mydb?autoReconnect=true"/>
      
     </Context>

Start LCDS

1. Point Tomcat to the bundled Tomcat installed with LCDS:
   • export CATALINA_HOME=/Applications/lcds/tomcat
   • Windows: set CATALINA_HOME=C:\lcds\tomcat
2. Set Java to Java 6:
   • export JRE_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home
   • Windows: set JRE_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_14\jre
3. Run it:
   • /Applications/lcds/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh run
   • Windows: C:\lcds\tomcat\bin\catalina.bat run
4. Sometimes Tomcat does not get the value of JRE_HOME (usually on Windows). The caused by a hard-coded value inside catalina.sh, you’ll need to edit this file and comment out that line.
5. Verify it all worked by browsing to:
   • http://localhost:8400/myapp/
6. A helpful bash script that does #1 – #3 all in one shot:

   • #!/bin/bash
     export CATALINA_HOME=/Applications/lcds/tomcat
     export JRE_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home
     /Applications/lcds/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh run

   • Windows:

     set CATALINA_HOME=C:\lcds\tomcat
     set JRE_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_14\jre
     C:\lcds\tomcat\bin\catalina.bat run

More Docs

1. What’s new in LCDS 3
2. LCDS Dev Guide (zip)
3. Tutorial Video – awesome, 20 min long, and very worthwhile

To Be Continued…

That’s it for Part 1. LCDS should be up and running on top of MySQL. Next up, Part 2 covers the Modeler plugin and model driven development.

Building Buttons

With a very minimal amount of effort, I was able to create a few “web 2.0″ button skins. I just followed one of the millions of glass button photoshop tutorials, but did the work in mxml code using Degrafa’s declarative syntax. Here are my results (view source enabled):

Button Explorer

But then I decided to take it a step further and build out a Degrafa Button Explorer (with a small tip of the hat to the original Flex Style Explorer). The Degrafa Button Explorer allows you to adjust a bunch of properties and colors for all three buttons styles. It goes a step further than the original and provides not only the CSS, but also the full code of the stateful Degrafa-powered button components.

 »  Degrafa Button Explorer

Digging Deeper: I’ve been following the skinning performance issues discovered by the guys at EffectiveUI. The most recent benchmarks appear to show that stateful Degrafa skins (like those produced by the Degrafa Button Explorer) are safe to use.

Service Layer

First, assume we have a nice service layer in Flex that talks asynchronously to our backend. Just something simple to start:

public class MyService {
    public function getSomething(result:Function, fault:Function):AsyncToken {
        //call the backend
        var token:AsyncToken = backend.getSomething();
 
        //wire the callbacks to the result
        token.addResponder(new AsyncResponder(result, fault, token));
 
        return token;
    }
}

In this example, our service only has one method, getSomething() that takes two callback functions. It simply calls the backend method, wires up the callbacks (which get called when the backend method returns a result), and returns the token. It is absolutely critical that our callback-powered service method return the AsyncToken. The reason for this will become apparent.

We might use our service like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application
        xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
        creationComplete="complete()">
 
    <mx:Script>
    <![CDATA[
        import com.saturnboy.services.MyService;
        private var service:MyService;
 
        private function complete():void {
            service = new MyService();
            service.getSomething(resultHandler, faultHandler);
        }
 
        private function resultHandler(result:Object, token:Object=null):void {
            lbl.text = result.result.name;
        }
 
        public function faultHandler(error:Object, token:Object=null):void {
            lbl.text = 'fault';
        }
    ]]>
    </mx:Script>
 
    <mx:Label id="lbl" text="initial" />
</mx:Application>

We make a call our service, and then use the callbacks to alter the UI however we want depending on the result. In common usage, the fact that our service returns an AsyncToken is worthless, it might as well return void. So, why did I say this is critical? Throw Fluint testing into the mix and it’s “Show em what’s behind door number 2, Johnny!”

Fluint Testing

Fluint provides two different async wrapper methods: asyncHandler and asyncResponder. The first allows a test to be wired to an async method by events, the second allows a test to be wired to an async method by a responder. Since the service method we’re trying to test doesn’t throw any events, we’ll need to use the latter. So inside a Fluint test case, we have our test method:

public function testGetSomething():void {
    //call service with dummy callback
    var token:AsyncToken = service.getSomething(dummyResult, dummyFault);
 
    //create async test responder
    var responder:IResponder = asyncResponder(
            new TestResponder(testHandler, faultHandler), 1000, token);
 
    //wire test responder as 2nd callback
    token.addResponder(responder);
}
private function testHandler(result:Object, passThroughData:Object):void {
    assertEquals('something', result.result.name);
}

The trick is to wire a second callback via Fluint’s asyncResponder helper that actually does the testing, and just give the original service call some dummy callbacks. Note that if the service method didn’t return its AsyncToken there would be no way to wire a second callback. The Fluint async helper do two import operations: they handle the event or call the callback AND they mark the test method as an async method so the result is correctly reported by the test harness. You can read more about Async Testing in Fluint’s wiki. The rest of Fluint is your standard chain of crap borrowed from JUnit: test runner, test suites, and test cases.

Digging Deeper: It is equally critical to use dummy callbacks in the original service method call because in a failure situation they will cause Flash Player to error out instead of being caught by Fluint and reported as a test failure.

Files

The complete code is up on GitHub here: test_fluint_async. The code is MIT licensed and includes a working fluint.swc (see below) plus a mock async backend (so timeouts and faults are easily testable).

Alas, Fluint v1.1.0 was built incorrectly and is missing the TestResponder class (see issue 35). So if you want to try out Fluint in your project, I recommend you grab it from svn and build the swc yourself. Hopefully, this will all be fixed in the next release.

UPDATE: Fluint v1.1.1 was release on May 1, 2009 and fixes this issues and a few others. Download it here.