I currently have 6 different flex applications (widgets) that run on a main page.
They all depend on one common library project.
I am currently cleaning up the codebase quite dramatically and it is hard to keep overview this way especially since I inherited the codebase.
Does anyone know a tool that can automatically inform me of any dead code?
Cheers
There are a few tools out there. I'd start with this one from Adobe; which I believe is written as an eclipse plugin.
FlexPMD is another tool; also from Adobe.
FlexCover is another.
Keep in mind that the Flex Compiler will automatically remove unused classes from your final SWF; so removing these classes from your project will probably not affect the final SWF size. I can see it helping with long-term maintenance, though..
Related
I am working with a client who has already purchased Magento -eCommerce CMS. I have never worked with this program and after reading over there extremely lengthy material I am not sure if I should take on the project. I am worried that this is a little outside of my skill set. I mostly do Design and Front-End Development. I have worked with Wordpress somewhat regularly without any problems, however that is extremely well documented. My understanding of actual programming is limited. Has anyone created a skin for Magento and if so, how complicated was it?
It depends on how you define complicated. Anyone with a good understand of Magento's architecture MAY actually call it intuitive. I can say that it has a significantly higher learning curve than many other packaged application in frameworks due to its shear number of features. It's extremely easy to think you done and found out from a client that there's a page you failed to style.
To better answer your question I'll tell you what you'll be facing.
CSS:
It is possibile, though difficult, to skin Magento using purely CSS. This can be made easier depending on your design.
HTML:
There are more individual templates than I'm willing to count. I want to say upwards of 40 ".phtml" files that you can edit each with an uncomfortable amount of logic to my taste (and I'm a programmer). For the most part you can manipulate the HTML within these files as you see fit with out any trouble. You probably will have trouble if you need to edit anything logic wise or that output by PHP
XML:
Magento uses xml files for what it calls layouts. These files are actually what puts the template files mentioned above together. To do some significant changes to the default layout you will have to change these.
Realizing that you referenced wordpress. Magento is SIGNIFICANTLY more difficult to skin than wordpress. Even after a very thorough understand of magento's architecture I still get hung up when changes. Magento is full of complex caches which can prevent your changes from being visible and unexpected dependencies which you can easily break if your not careful.
This is probably a horribly written answer but I hope it helps.
One of the most annoying things when working with Flash/Flex projects is that it takes soo long to build the project. In a Flash game I am doing, it takes more than one minute to build it...
So, the question is simple: Is that normal? Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to minimize this?
A common way of avoiding the long build-times is to divide your project up into multiple projects and reference them in as SWC's in a Main project.
Actually the shorter build times are mostly considered a positive side effect, as any larger project really ought to be divided into multiple project. Typically you will have more than one library project, handling the service layer/ controller ect.
This way you could for move the controller/ game logic to one project. This would have longer intervals between changes, and therefore you could close this project, building only the one you are currently working in.
If you are using a lot of assets from Flash ect. move those to a SWC as well.
A simple tip that makes compile time from the Flash IDE a bit shorter: Go to 'publish settings' > actionscript 3.0 > settings > disable 'Warnings Mode'
This mode checks if you are using actionscript 2.0 functions. If you know what you are doing (not copy/paste as2.0 code into as3.0 projects), you'll never need these 'warnings'.
Another tip is to use lots of SWC's: if you are using a tweenengine or a framework; most of them are available as SWC files. Use them.
Yes, it is normal. it can take more if your projects get bigger and bigger.
I have a flex project that a full build (using ANT not flex builder) takes 4 minutes.
The best advice I can give you on the subject and is an SSD drive, an SSD drive installed on my Mac cut the times by more then 50%.
I've found embedding assets tends to delay build times considerably. It's hardly noticeable at first but after a while they start stacking up and build time increases.
Maybe try delaying embedding assets a long as you can.
We have a flex based UI whose functionality (eg: login, logout) needs to be tested periodically in IE 7. Manual testing takes a lot of time and hence we want to automate it.
EDIT: We dont have the source code of this app uder test so cannot use something like FlexUnit. Is there a way to automate this testing?
I have heard of FleXmonkey, but have read negative reviews of it and hence wary of trying it.
EDIT: source of negative review:
Automated testing of FLEX based applications
(Comment by Ryan H)
Please suggest if theres a way to go about it.
EDIT: An open-source solution is preferred.
Thank you.
You won't get very far in your development adventures if you avoid reviewing things just because you read negative reviews. ( Please provide a source for said negative reviews ). I've also read bad things about Flex and Flash Builder and the Flash Player. Yet, you still ended up using Flex?
That said, I strongly suggest checking out Flex Monkey.
RIATest is another option.
I believe you can also do this sort of testing with QTP. I couldn't find a specific source for QTP info, but there are a few links if you google.
http://www.learnqtp.com/does-quicktest-professional-support-flashadobe-flex-applications/
http://vishnuagrawal.blogspot.com/2009/04/flex-automation-testing-with-qtp.html
Without recompiling the source code, it is not possible to test Flex in all cases. Saucelabs IDE claims that it can test Flex without recompiling the code. You may check that.
I think FlexMonkey is pretty cool and worth judging on your own. Most of these tools use the same underlying automation framework provided by Adobe, and thus have many of the same pains and challenges. We've actually done a lot the last few months to make it easier to work with and have been working to provide more documentation on dealing with common challenges.
If you do have problem, you will find that our Forums are very active with questions and answers: http://www.gorillalogic.com/forum/7
-Jon Rose -
Gorilla Logic, Inc
Some Flex automation tools support testing of Flex applications without requiring to recompile it.
RIATest definitely supports it (called runtime loading) and if I am not wrong QTP does it as well. AFAIK there are no open source tools that support it.
Beware though that runtime loading is not for every application. If for example you are using custom html wrapper you cannot use it with runtime loading.
Has anyone had any luck testing a Flex app without static Automation IDs attached to components? All of the elements in the apps are generated .....
We've investigated FlexMonkey but it appears to be incompatible with any app that utilizes the ExternalInterface. RIATest's scripting language leaves much to be desired...
Thanks-
Jonathan
Unfortunately I don't know much about this kind of stuff, but I went to a talk that presented these tools for TDD:
- Hudson
- Flex Unit 4
I guess there are tutorials online, don't know if it helps with ExternalInterface testing.
Is there anything that prevents you from generating appropriate automationNames for your generated components? This way you should be able to refer to them properly in automation tools.
Are there any other non-changing properties that your generated components have, like maybe 'id'? If so you can use these properties to address the components. This is definitely possible in RIATest.
FunFX is a Flex automation tool that allows you to access components via ID, "automation name", "automation value" or index. While using something like the component index might be less than ideal for robust tests, if that's all that's stable, it might be worth a try. And it's written in Ruby, so that should satisfy any "real programming language" related requirements. :)
We added an "automationPrefix" property to many of our custom controls (particularly those that are reused many times on a single screen), and wrote code to append the beginning of the automationName property on any child controls. Setting the automationName was the most important parting of enabling automation testing on our Flex apps. There are several ways you could modify the automationName to be unique without making it completely static at the level that most test automation packages need it. We are currently using QTP as the test automation tool of choice.
I have a Flex application that seems larger than it should be. There is a lot of code in it, but not a lot of assets and it just seems large, but I'm not sure how to go about figuring out where the space is going.
I know about the –link-report option, but it only gives the sizes of externally linked library classes. I'm very interested in seeing a report of the sizes of all the classes and resources in my application and it would be a huge bonus if I could also view their dependencies. Not knowing how the code is compiled I'm not sure if this is even possible, but it seems like it should since the compiler can give me the sizes of individual classes linked from other libraries.
I did some searching around, but couldn't find anything helpful. Everything points to the optimization techniques of modularizing and externally linking libraries, which I understand and will implement, but I would really love some more detailed reports of what my compiled application looks like.
To be clear, I'm not really interested in tips on how to reduce the file size, just a report on what is used for and which classes are referencing what.
Anybody have any ideas?
CORRECTION - The link report does show all classes. My particular project in Flex Builder had several CSS files set to compile to swfs. My link report for the main app was being overwritten by these css compiles!
The link report actually contains all compiled classes and not just the ones in external libraries (at least with the Flex 4 SDK). There is an xsl available that will generate an html file of the link report so it is easier to read.
Check this post: http://blog.iconara.net/2007/02/25/visualizing-mxmlcs-link-report/
There is a command-line utility called flash.swf.tools.SwfxPrinter in swfkit.jar, which comes with Flex Builder (or the plug-in or the SDK) and which you can use to analyze information about class sizes. Joe Berkovitz wrote some good instructions on how to make use of it in his blog, and he was working on an AIR-based GUI tool that leverages it, but I'm not sure if he ever published the tool. Still, you can use his instructions to leverage the utility directly from the JAR.
I found a handy little AIR app that really helps organize the link report info.
http://www.kahunaburger.com/2008/03/08/air-link-report-visualizer/
It's old but still works very well.