I’d like to send a huge thanks to Doug Reynolds for inviting me to present at the user group. I’d also like to send a huge thanks to everyone that attended the presentation both at the user group and remotely via Connect. A big shout out to Stray for the help reviewing the presentation content and also providing a quote for the slideshow!!

Lastly, a HUGE thanks to Roy Osherove for the inspiration and fantastic content both in his book The Art of Unit Testing and his videos.

I hope my presentation helps people get started with TDD and TDD Kata. If you have any questions about TDD please don’t hesitate to post a comment or hit me up on twitter.

This presentation introduces you to the benefits of Test Driven Development and teaches the fundamentals of TDD practice through a TDD Kata. A Kata is an idea borrowed from martial arts – an exercise done regularly in order to hone the practitioner’s skills – in this case the test-error-code-fail-code-pass cycle. Clearly testing offers reduction of defects and increased code confidence, but this presentation will illustrate how truly Test *Driven* Development brings much deeper benefits. You’ll leave the presentation with a TDD Kata that you can practice to increase your TDD skills and speed over time, and an understanding of why taking time to build TDD in to your workflow pays dividends.

Here’s a link to more info about the presentation and how to attend:

http://bniria.groups.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=post.display&postid=36277

See you there

I’ve been using SourceMate for a little while and there are some really powerful, time saving features. There are some handy functions like comment/uncomment all for classes. This is a good time saver. There are some really powerful refactoring tools and also the ability to create ActionScript and MXML code templates.

The plug-in is available in Flash Builder as a top level menu and also provides other integration points in the right click menu and other areas. Some cool features are: the ability to generate getter/setters for class properties, generate toString methods, change method signature, convert local variable to field (class property), extract method/interface/constant/local variable, override implement methods, and more!

SourceMate provides the ability to generate Ant build scripts and also generate and build ASDoc.

Flash Builder is great on its own but SourceMate adds some really great, time saving functionality. I’m still exploring it and have yet to really become a power user, there’s still a TON of stuff that I plan on rolling into my Flex development workflow.

You can get a free 30 day demo and the price is more than reasonable for the power that you get.

I highly recommend stopping by the Element River site, downloading the trial, checking out some of their screenshots and videos and giving SourceMate a try. Five stars!!!

I’d like to point out a couple things. 1.) These are all in good fun. No offence is intended. I try not to take myself too seriously, the Senior Developer poster is targeted directly at myself. 2.) At the moment I’m just pulling images from google so I don’t have the rights to them. If  you see an image that you DO have rights to and do not want it used just contact me and I’ll take it down. I’m not selling these or anything just fyi. If there is enough interest I’ll start using images I can get the rights to and start selling them, time will tell… Post a comment if you’d be interested in buying these.

With that said let’s get to the visuals! Here’s the new posters, enjoy!!

Of course being a “Flex guy” I used Flex / Flash Builder, AS3 and Flex Unit for the TDD Kata. There are a few different Kata’s that you can practice but I went with the first one that I found on google, (StringCalculator). It seemed to be pretty widely accepted and practiced and from my point of view came from a pretty reliable source. When doing TDD Kata you timebox the exercise. This is to help you increase in speed as you continue to practice. I used to study Kempo and actually did real Kata’s at one point in time so I kinda get what it’s all about. It’s a way to repetitively practice something until you get to the point where you’re not really thinking about the actions anymore, you’re just executing the Kata. My first pass at the StringCalculator Kata went so-so. I wasn’t able to finish it, but didn’t really expect to. I anticipate that as I continue to practice the Kata I’ll increase my speed and also improve my ability to think in a TDD fashion.

TDD is great because it really forces you to think through the code you’re writing before you write it. This helps keep things somewhat in control. Rather than just pounding out line after line of code to “get it done” you think forward about potential issues and shortcomings of the functionality you’re creating. In addition having a reliable, well thought out Test Suite will ensure that you can refactor your code without the fear of negatively affecting other areas of the codebase.

I’ve posted a video of my first TDD Kata session. It’s about 30 minutes long and it’s really large (1920×1080). I left Flash Builder maximized while recording and have a decent sized monitor so my apologies if it’s hard to see what’s going on. I’ll set up a recording region next time with the screen recording software and try to keep things a little smaller. I hope to keep doing this Kata as much as possible, at the very minimum once a week. I’ll post updates to the blog with my experience and progress and post some more recordings as I improve. Hopefully this post has turned you on to something new or provided you with some laughs as you watch me code through the Kata

San Diego Flash Users Group: Flex Best Practices Presentation

To start 2009 off I gave my first presentation to an awesome group of Flash and Flex developers in San Diego. The presentation was created from the two articles I wrote in 2008 for the Adobe Developer Connection on Best Practices for Flex development. I’ve kept the Powerpoint presentation offline until now. Some of the content is a little dated but it’s probably still worth checking out. I may update this presentation with everything I’ve learned over the last year and for the upcoming changes coming in Flex 4, if time permits.

Download the Flex Best Practices Powerpoint Presentation here.

Java Programming II at UCSD

After wanting to learn more about Java for many years I decided to go back to school and take a structured class. This was the first time I’d set foot in a classroom since about 1998. It was through the UCSD Extension program but classes were held on the UCSD campus. It was pretty cool to walk around the campus and see the “college” life again after so long. In addition this was the first time I’d ever taken a class at a University, my previous college experience was at a community college. The instructor Kent Yang was really awesome and the class was killer! I learned a lot more about Java, OOP, Unit Testing and Design Patterns. This knowledge was all transferable into AS3/Flex so the experience was well worth the time and investment.

Check out the class details here.

The Flex Show Episode 71: OOP w/ Sean Moore

The Flex Show is awesome, simply stated. Jeffry Houser has done an excellent job with the podcast and I’ve been a fan for a few years now. One of my goals was to be a guest on The Flex Show and in 2009 in became a reality. I was able to put together a talk about OOP in regards to Flex and ActionScript development. The Java class helped solidify my knowledge of OOP so hopefully the talk will help others grasp some of the fundamental OO concepts. It was an honor to be on the show and I really appreciate the opportunity. Hopefully I can do another show sometime in the future. Maybe on the Mindset BCI work I’ve been doing lately.

You can listen to my talk on The Flex Show here.

Orange County Flex Users Group: Flex Best Practices Presentation

Laura Arguello was kind enough to invite me to give my Flex Best Practices preso at the OCFlex Users Group in March. This gave me a chance to visit the ASFusion office before the preso and hang out with Jeremy Saenz (aka The Flex Gangster) a bit as well. The crowd at OCFlex was really great and very patient as I got set up and had some trouble finding a room at the venue big enough for everyone. Thanks again to ASFusion and the OCFlex Users Group for inviting me to present. It was a great experience!

Technical Authoring for O’Reilly InsideRIA

2008 was a big year for me and authoring. I wrote articles for Adobe, Flash Magazine and O’Reilly’s InsideRIA. I continued the trend in 2009 by writing three featured articles for InsideRIA. Rich Tretola is one of the coolest guys I know and such a pleasure to work with. He helped me a ton with the articles I wrote this year through the good and the bad. Another person I really have to thank is Matt Chotin. His feedback on my Flex 4 article was a huge help and I really appreciate his time and input! You can check out the articles I wrote for InsideRIA below:

Round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization techniques and practices

Overview of Flex 4 (Gumbo)

Decorator Design Pattern

Technical Reviews for Manning Publications

Reviewing books is great for a lot of reasons, it helps your writing skills, you get a preview of the books before they’re published and you get to contribute to the quality of the books being published. I do the reviews on a volunteer basis and really enjoy and appreciate the opportunity to do so. In 2009 I had the privilege of reviewing three books for Manning. They are all great titles and I encourage you to check them out.

Hello! Flex 4

Flex On Java

Flex 4 In Action

Present.ly AIR Client Development

This is one of the larger apps that I worked on completely by myself. Dave at Intridea got in touch with a request to help them refactor an existing AIR application to best practices. This project was one of the best projects I’ve ever had the pleasure of working on. The app was cool, the concept was cool and the client was cool. The Present.ly service is a private Twitter like service for businesses, if you haven’t already taken a minute to check it out I encourage you to do so. Another really awesome aspect of this project is that the codebase for the AIR app is totally open source and available for download on GIT Hub. I was able to use Cairngorm and Flex Unit on this project which I feel really helped the codebase and application’s stability and scalability. You can check out the codebase and the finished app by following the links below:

Present.ly AIR source code at GIT Hub

Present.ly AIR Client

Game Consulting and Development

A game development company contacted me for some assistence with consulting and development for a Flex and Flash based game. This was my first experience doing any game dev and it was really great. This was another awesome client. They are not public yet so there aren’t any links to share. I did want to note that game development is something that I’d like to do more of and hopefully 2010 will present more opportunities to do so.

Parsley

Learning Parsley was been on my radar for quite some time. I’ve been able to work with the framework quite a bit over the last few months and really like it so far. It’s quite a bit different than Cairngorm development but it offers more flexibility and is the preferred direction by many developers. IoC frameworks are all the rage and I am glad to be learning how to use them.

Presentation Model

This design pattern is great. It enables better unit testing for your applications and helps to decouple logic from views. Using the Presentation Model wasn’t totally clear at first but after working with it for a while I’m really beginning to like it. Having a bunch of code in MXML files wasn’t really ever all that appealing to me and using the Presentation Model really helps to separate this code out into pure AS3 classes.

ThinkGear Brain Computer Interface API

In an effort to end 2009 with a bang I released my ThinkGear API. This API enables the Neurosky Mindset Brain Computer Interface to communicate with AS3 based applications. So far I’ve been able to build a rough dashboard that uses my brainwaves as its data source. In addition I was able to tie my brainwaves into some AS3 based particle visualizations. You can see my demo video and learn more here. Control ActionScript with your mind!!!

Well here’s looking to 2010. I can’t believe it’s already been a decade since Y2K. It’s been a great decade for the Flash Platform we’ve all come a long way.

]]> http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/2009/11/01/the-decorator-design-pattern-and-open-closed-principle/feed/ 0 http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/2009/08/15/presently-microblogging-air-application-for-business-open-source/ http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/2009/08/15/presently-microblogging-air-application-for-business-open-source/#comments Sat, 15 Aug 2009 18:49:28 +0000 seantheflexguy http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/?p=363 For a good part of 2009 I had the extreme pleasure of working with Intridea on an open source AIR application for their Present.ly microblogging service. Present.ly provides a secure and private way to share updates among members of a company, without them being visible to the outside world. The service has a Twitter-compatible API so tools built for Twitter can be adapted to Present.ly (with a few small modifications). You can learn more about the service and how it’s different from Twitter on the website, specifically the tour. I recommend watching this video for a brief introduction to what the service is all about.

This was a great project to work on and the people at Intridea were just awesome to work with. They allowed me to do the development without any distraction or micro-management. The application already existed when they got in touch but they wanted to change a few things and also update the codebase to a more standards based approach since the app is open source. The codebase now uses Cairngorm and Flex Unit and is also fully commented for ASDoc. It also used Degrafa for some of the view. I’d really like to thank Dave at Intridea for the opportunity to work together, it was a great experience and I really enjoyed working on the application.

You can visit the page for the AIR client here. The app is available for download and you can also browse or download the source code from github.

Intridea also has several other applications for the Present.ly service including a really cool web based application, an iPhone app and an Android app to name a few.

Take a minute to check out the Present.ly service. It was mentioned as Best-Bet Collaboration Tool by Inc. Magazine and also won an WebWare 100 Editor’s Choice Award. Intridea is a pretty cool company doing some exciting things!! You can sign up for the Present.ly service here.

Cairngorm
Cairngorm is the lightweight micro-architecture for Rich Internet Applications built in Flex or AIR. A collaboration of recognized design patterns, Cairngorm exemplifies and encourages best-practices for RIA development advocated by Adobe Consulting, encourages best-practice leverage of the underlying Flex framework, while making it easier for medium to large teams of software engineers deliver medium to large scale, mission-critical Rich Internet Applications.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/cairngorm/Cairngorm

Download: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/opensource/cairngorm/cairngorm2_2_1-bin.zip

Flex Unit
FlexUnit is a unit testing framework for Flex and ActionScript 3.0 applications and libraries. It mimics the functionality of JUnit, a Java unit testing framework, and comes with a graphical test runner.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexunit/FlexUnit

Download: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/opensource/flexunit/flexunit0_9.zip

Subclipse
Subclipse is an Eclipse Team Provider plug-in providing support for Subversion within the Eclipse IDE. The software is released under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0 open source license.

http://subclipse.tigris.org/

Eclipse update site URL: http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x

Eclipse
Eclipse is a multi-language software development platform comprising an IDE and a plug-in system to extend it. It is written primarily in Java and is used to develop applications in this language and, by means of the various plug-ins, in other languages as well – C, C++, COBOL, Python, Perl, PHP and more.

http://www.eclipse.org

Download: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

ASDoc
ASDoc is a command-line tool that you can use to create API language reference documentation as HTML pages from the classes in your Adobe® Flex® application. The Adobe Flex team uses the ASDoc tool to generate the Adobe Flex Language Reference.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=asdoc_1.html

Flex Ant Tasks
The Adobe® Flex® Ant tasks provide a convenient way to build your Flex projects using an industry-standard build management tool. If you are already using Ant projects to build Flex applications, you can use the Flex Ant tasks to replace your exec or java commands that invoke the mxmlc and compc compilers. If you are not yet using Ant to build your Flex applications, you can take advantage of these custom tasks to quickly and easily set up complex build processes for your Flex applications.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=anttasks_1.html

Installation: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=anttasks_2.html#224215

Degrafa
Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework open source licensed under MIT.

http://www.degrafa.org

Download: http://www.degrafa.org/code/

as3corelib
The corelib project is an ActionScript 3 Library that contains a number of classes and utilities for working with ActionScript 3. These include classes for MD5 and SHA 1 hashing, Image encoders, and JSON serialization as well as general String, Number and Date APIs.

http://code.google.com/p/as3corelib/

Download: http://as3corelib.googlecode.com/files/as3corelib-.92.1.zip

Flex SDK coding conventions and best practices
Coding standards for writing open-source Flex framework components in ActionScript 3. Adhering to these standards makes the source code look consistent, well-organized, and professional.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Coding+Conventions

Flex Language Reference
The Flex 3.3 Language Reference provides syntax and usage information for every element in the ActionScript™ language. It documents all elements in Adobe® Flash® Player and Adobe® AIR™ that are officially supported by Adobe.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/