Comments on: How to run FlexUnit in a continuous build

By: zwetan

zwetan — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:59:32 +0000

Hi, I took another shot at the problemthe Flash Player or AIR runtime both use the Tamarin VM to execute ActionScript, and on top of it add their respective APIso basically I added few extras to the Tamarin VM and ported my own unit tests framework to run in a CLI, so my unit tests can run in that VM on the command-linea longer more detailled explanation can be found here http://groups.google.co.uk/group/flex-mojos/msg/a03b08871bab137a let me know what do you think about it

By: misko

misko — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:48:21 +0000

I was not aware of those projects, let me check them out…

By: Luke Bayes

Luke Bayes — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 19:24:38 +0000

There are still some problems here.1) It’s ideal to run your test harness in an environment that is as close as possible to your production environment, and unless your application is intended for AIR, then compiling to AIR includes a lot of unintended code. The same goes for ActionScript only projects that are tested using FlexUnit, Flex applications are not the same as ActionScript applications.2) Just like the desktop and browser debug Flash Players, AIR launches a GUI dialog with any uncaught runtime exceptions. This means that your CI machine will hang and at best – simply fail with a timeout and no useful information, whenever an exception occurs with the frame clock at the top of the stack.The solution?AsUnit and ProjectSprouts.Among many things, Sprouts includes a Continuous Integration Rake task that runs in the Flex Debugger instead of the Flash Player, this gives us the ability to capture uncaught runtime exceptions, output the failure stack trace and all variables (and values) in the local scope where the failure occurred, and close down properly.Of course test results, including failures, are always output to an XUnit XML results file.Check it out and let us know what you think!Thanks