Re: [Asunit-users] Problems getting started

[Luke B. <lb...@gm...>]

Hey David,

Thanks so much for taking the time with your feedback. You're absolutely
correct that AsUnit ships with a pretty wide variety of features that are
intended to make TDD a bit easier, but sometimes wind up making things more
complex than they need to be. Ali and I have been struggling with these
issues for quite some time and would really like to find a way to make
things simpler.

To be honest, we haven't actually used the MXP build in a very long time
since neither of us enjoy coding or compiling with Flash Authoring, and even
worse neither of us works on a Mac. Even in our most recent project where we
were compelled to use Authoring for some assets, we still finished
compilation with MTASC and used FDT for real development. Both of us mainly
just use the XUL UI at this point and I find it to be much more flexible and
useful. It sounds like you have uncovered a pretty serious and debilitating
mac bug in the MXP tools. I have some quick guesses about where the bug is,
if someone is still getting value out of this tool and is interested in
addressing this issue, please contact me off list so we can talk about
getting a fix in before the next release.

One thing that we've been considering is decoupling AsUnit from all of these
extras and basically just shipping the framework code completely separately
as SWC files with simple "Getting Started Tutorials", then deploying these
extra tools with more specific instructional content... The MXP and XUL UI
are really just add-ons that are intended to take some of the drudgery out
of TestCase and TestSuite creation and maintenance.

As far as your question about the imports goes, I'm not exactly sure what is
causing the problem that you're seeing. It sounds like you're having
problems because there are files in the as2 branch that end in "Test.as",
and suites are being injected into those folders. If that's the issue, you
should be able to remove any files that end in "Test.as" from you local
classpath build and this might fix the problem. Those files aren't necessary
and we're actually planning on moving them out of the distribution in the
near future.

Another possibly informative article about as2 vs as25 can be found here:

AsUnit Framework 2 vs
2.5<http://www.asserttrue.com/articles/2006/10/23/asunit-framework-as2-vs-as25>

You might also be having problems with previously-created TestCases from the
MXP for the as2 framework, and now you might be using 25 templates from the
XUL UI.

With XUL UI, You can build to as2, as25 or as3 classes, but from the MXP,
you can only really build to as2 (unless you dig around and directly modify
the really ugly templates yourself). If you're using the XUL UI, and would
like the as2 support, choose the first item in the Templates pulldown ("AS
2, Flash Players 6, 7 or 8"), the second template choice is actually for the
as25 branch which only supports Flash Players 7 and 8 and uses a slightly
different import scheme.

To your point about building a wiki...

Ali and I have generally had a difficult time really getting at good
information in wikis. It's been my impression that the really successful
wikis require a pretty heavy amount of management and organization effort.
Neither of us really have the time to invest in such a thing, but if anyone
out there would be interested in setting up and/or hosting such a thing, it
would definitely receive our full support with editing, links, mentions,
emails, etc... I could definitely consider pointing a subdomain of asunit in
that direction, we would be glad to offer some help for the initial
organization of it too.

http://wiki.asunit.org...

Anyone interested?

Please feel free to contact me off list if you find yourself with some time
to contribute to the project.


Thanks,


Luke Bayes
www.asunit.org