We recently got a question on the Sprouts Group about Continuous Integration (CI) and I thought I’d try to give it a quick explanation here.

The idea behind Continuous Integration is that you have a machine somewhere on the network that will check out, compile and test your application after almost every check-in. Whenever failures are encountered anywhere in that process, the entire team is notified. This helps us discover unexpected regressions or injections early which helps us pinpoint and address their root causes more efficiently.

This process can be useful in any project, but is especially helpful when working with teams that are all checking into different components of a larger project.

There are essentially three major problems when attempting to introduce ActionScript or Flex applications to typical CI systems:

• The Flash Player requires a visual window manager to execute your test harness (Usually X-Windows on Linux)

• The Flash Player does not give us the ability to capture all runtime exceptions, and when an uncaught runtime exception is encountered in the Debug Flash Player, a GUI dialog box is presented that must be manually clicked with a mouse in order to continue or abort execution. This can hang a typical CI set up, and result in an unhelpful “execution timeout” failure.

• It can be challenging to get a Linux machine properly configured to compile your ActionScript or Flex application, run your test harness, and collect trace output and error messages.

Preprocessing? Check.

With more big thanks to Dru Nelson of BrightRoll, we have just dropped new releases of the sprout and as3 gems that support preprocessing for any compiler task.

You can add the preprocessor directive to any compilation task (or project model if you’re using task ‘helpers’).

The rdoc for the base ToolTask has more detailed information.

To get the latest version open a new terminal and enter the following:

gem update sprout-as3-bundle

As always, please let us know if you run into any issues!

Back in March 2005, Mike Chambers wrote a couple interesting posts about using cpp, a C pre-processor, to pre-process ActionScript files.

He noted that, while cpp is included on Mac OS X, for some reason it wasn’t working for him. Well, I think that I just found the reason. It appears that cpp’s docs and man pages don’t emphasize how picky the tool is about white space.

To get the examples to work on my MacBook, I had to make some minor white space modifications.

Sprouts has quite a wide variety of different libraries available that you can instantly include in your project.

as3crypto
as3flickrlib-src
as3flickrlib
as3mapprlib-src
as3mapprlib
as3syndicationlib-src
as3syndicationlib
as3youtubelib-src
as3youtubelib
asunit25
asunit3
bulkloader
cairngorm-src
cairngorm
corelib-src
corelib
degrafa
facebook-api
flexlib-src
flexlib
flexunit-src
flexunit
fuse
papervision
swx
tweener
tweeneras2
yahoomapsas3

You can include any of these libraries by simply adding them as a symbol to your project_model.

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project_model :model do |m|
  m.project_name            = 'SomeProject'
  m.language                = 'mxml'
  m.background_color        = '#FFFFFF'
  m.width                   = 970
  m.height                  = 550
  m.libraries               << :corelib
  m.libraries               << :papervision
end

This will automatically download and install these libraries into your project and update your compilation tasks to make these targets available!

If you find that the downloaded libraries aren’t working or are out of date, please send us an email with a link to the latest files.

Read on to learn more about packaging up your own libraries!

I just wanted to get a quick announcement out there.

While Ali and I were working at Bunchball, we built out a huge application using PureMVC.

As we worked with PureMVC, we encountered some issues that didn’t quite feel right. One of the major factors that drew us to PureMVC in the first place was that Cliff designed everything to work with interfaces instead of hard-coded object references.

This proved to be a critical feature that helped support our desired modifications.

Since leaving Bunchball, Rajat Praharia (the CEO) has generously agreed to let us open-source the modifications under a new project we called, FlexMVCS.

It looks like some of the modifications we made have been integrated with later releases of PureMVC, and to be honest, we haven’t really kept up with changes in the underlying project.

As it stands, we’re not planning on putting much time into this project, but we wanted to get it out there for people that might find it useful.

Please check it out and let us know what you think!