BJ and I have decided to throw our hat into the ring and submitted a session proposal to the Agile 2008 conference. You can read about it and comment on it on the Agile 2008 submission site here (http://submissions.agile2008.org/node/1676), or I’ve copied the summary below.

In 2002 Macromedia used the term “Rich Internet Applications” (RIA) to describe the next generation of web applications that have all of the benefits of a traditional desktop application, with the flexibility of being deployed via the Internet.

However, it’s 2008 and RIA has not been able to penetrate the business application sector with any real success. The old days of RIA are history. (Maintenance nightmares, weird or no unit testing, and little friendliness toward other agile developer practices.)

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Testing J2EE components has always been a difficult task, which is probably why I see so many web projects that have few tests written for the web layer or sometimes none at all. Late last year Spring announced the release of Spring 2.5 , with some nice additions to the suite of mock testing objects for unit testing web components. That’s right unit testing web components, not in container testing. So like any good agile programmer let’s start with the test first.

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Now as most people will tell you I’m kind of a geek when it comes to Maven. It’s really a nice tool and it makes dependency management in large projects almost a no brainer…almost. The story I’m about to share is true, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent…

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Earlier today I had posed a question to a mailing list in the .NET community asking about Continuous Integration with Flex in the .NET world. After a couple of answers from people who obviously did not understand the question, because they just told me to google CruiseControl.NET, someone with some knowledge of TDD and Agile practices stepped up and pointed out the obvious point I was trying to make. There currently is no real good way to automate your FlexUnit tests in such a way that a CI server like CC.NET or HudsonCI would know whether or not all of the tests for your Actionscript classes passed or failed.

So I’ve decided to start a Google Code project called agile-flex, where a couple of other developers and I will attempt to build some agile tools for the Flex framework, starting with a test runner that will help enable continuous integration for Java, .NET, or even just plain old Actionscript. The runner will likely be based off an article I found from Aaron Spjut here. In a nutshell we will create a test runner in Adobe AIR that will generate XML output similar to JUnit and NUnit for the CI server to be able to interpret. This will also enable the generation of report artifacts using the JUnit Report tasks or even a custom XSLT if desired. I’ll post more details as the project continues.

This past week I was fortunate enough to attend CodeMash v2.0.0.8 in Sandusky, Ohio. This conference is unlike anything I’ve ever been to, somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 Java programmers, .NET fan-boys and Ruby zealots all under one roof, and even having a little fun together.

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Recently I’ve had lot’s of questions about how to create multi-module projects, so when I discovered this technique, I thought I’d write this up. This technique exploits a little known feature of the archetype:create plugin, and the Maven site archetype to kickstart your project. Creating a multi-module project has many benefits, one of them being the ability to build every artifact in a project with one simple “mvn compile” command. Another benefit is that if you are using either the maven eclipse:eclipse plugin or the idea:idea plugin, you can enter this command at the root of the project and it will generate all of the project files for all of the contained modules.

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