assertTrue is the professional blog of Luke Bayes and Ali Mills

Test-Driven Development with Sprouts in San Francsisco on Thursday

Posted by: Luke Bayes Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:03:00 GMT

Just getting a quick note out to everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area.

There’s been a last minute setup of the Silicon Valley Flash User Group (Silvafug) and I’ve been asked to present Sprouts.

Of course I’ll be giving the now-traditional 5 minute ‘up-n-running’ demo that everyone is probably sick of seeing, but afterward I’ll be getting into some nuts and bolts of how Sprouts works in my own Test-First development process.

Paul Robertson is speaking for the first half of the evening on “AIR: Windows, Menus, and the System Tray.” which I’m really looking forward to!

At the time this post went to press, the Silvafug website hadn’t yet been updated, but according to this email, the event is scheduled to go from 5:30pm to 9:30ish at the San Francisco Adobe building (601 Townsend Street).

For those of you that don’t know, this means that we’ll be at the Mars bar from about 9:30-ish onward!

Hope to see you there.

Tags sprouts | no comments

AsDoc and COMPC now supported in Sprouts

Posted by: Luke Bayes Mon, 25 Feb 2008 08:24:00 GMT

I just got some enhancements into the Sprout packages that provide full support for asdoc and compc.

The AsDoc support is especially handy because it gives the full terminal interface, but also allows you to generate documentation against any already defined MXMLC task without duplicating all of your configuration!

A Rakefile might look something like this:

desc "Compile the main application"
mxmlc 'bin/SomeProject.swf' do |t|
  t.input = 'src/SomeProject.as'
  t.source_path = 'lib/yourlib'
  t.source_path = 'lib/asunit'
  t.source_path = 'test'
  t.source_path = 'src'
end

desc "Generate documentation"
asdoc :doc => 'bin/SomeProject.swf'

That’s it!

You just set an MXMLC task as a prerequisite for an asdoc task and the configuration options are inherited.

The latest as3 bundle gem automatically adds something similar to all of your new project rake files.

You can always get the latest Rubyforge gems with the following:

sprout -R
sudo gem update sprout

Be sure to let us know if anything doesn’t work as expected!

Tags sprouts | no comments

Creating Custom Generators with Sprouts

Posted by: Luke Bayes Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:25:00 GMT

As Sprouts starts to pick up momentum, we’re starting to get questions about creating custom generators. So I thought I’d throw a quick post up to share the info more broadly.

I’m actively working on the ‘developer’ gem so that you will eventually be able to stub new sprout gems for tools, libraries, bundles, tasks and generators. Unfortunately that gem isn’t quite ready yet so for the time being, you’ll have to build your generators manually.

If you’re looking for code generators within the context of an existing project, here’s how to do it:

Sprouts Public Beta is Released!

Posted by: Luke Bayes Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:56:00 GMT

Ever spend half a day getting your development environment all set up for a new project? How about longer? Ever multiply that cost by the number of team members involved? How about running Continuous Integration tools (Like CruiseControl.rb) with ActionScript?

Sprouts can get you up and running with a new ActionScript 2.0, ActionScript 3.0 or Flex project in minutes regardless of whether you’re running DOS, Cygwin, OS X, Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora.

Sprouts also provides deep, versioned support for shared ActionScript libraries including AsUnit, Corelib, Cairngorm, PureMVC, and more!

We’ve finally reached public beta, and even have a shiny new website contributed by Todd Cullen!

We have complete documentation available, you can check out our Google Code project and even join our discussion group and let us know if anything doesn’t work as expected!

I’ll be presenting the latest and greatest tomorrow evening (Thursday February 21, 2008) at the 2nd meeting of the SanFlashcisco group.

Hope to see you there!

Tags sprouts | no comments | no trackbacks

Why would someone use Sprouts?

Posted by: Luke Bayes Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:57:00 GMT

An interesting conversation has emerged in the comments of a FlexOnRails post. Firstly, I’d like to thank those guys for mentioning us! Secondly, I’d like to apologize for writing such a ridiculously long post in their comments section, it’s kind of embarrassing, but anyone that knows me knows that I can run off at the mouth (or keyboard) like no one else!

For the sake of getting something productive done today, I’m just going to copy and paste the comments in here:

Tags sprouts | 5 comments | 1 trackback

Announcing Sprouts! (was AsProject)

Posted by: Luke Bayes Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:17:00 GMT

I just wanted to get out a quick announcement before too much more time went by….

I introduced AsProject in April and have since been redesigning it under a new, much more manageable project called Sprouts. Just yesterday it reached a point where it’s at least testable on both OS X and Windows (with Cygwin).

I’m looking for some help getting it production ready (check out the issues list) and feature feedback from the community before I go much further.

Please check it out and let me know what you think, what it needs, and what doesn’t work the way you expect.

Introducing AsProject!

Posted by: Luke Bayes Wed, 04 Apr 2007 19:15:00 GMT

UPDATE: The new versions of Sprouts actually pull down and install the Flex SDK automatically!

UPDATE: AsProject has been refactored, renamed and moved, development is ongoing at the new location for “Sprouts”.

I’m elated to finally announce AsProject!

This is a cross platform, open source ActionScript development tool set that I’ve been working on for the past couple of months.

AsProject automates a variety of tasks including the creation of projects, classes, test cases, test suites, and swfmill libraries. It automates the download, installation and configuration of the debug flash player and many open source tools. AsProject also includes sophisticated build tools written in rake to automate build processes.

If this sounds interesting to you check out the video demo!