Hi, > A beginner question - in regard to Terry's point about the layering of the > SDKs over the last available Flex SDK from Adobe, I'm not quite clear how > additional capabilities in flash player are added to the apache flex > development environment. Currently Apache Flex does use any of the new capabilities added to the newer version of the Flash Player as a) we aim to be backwards compatible and b) I'm not sure any recents features added would improved the SDK in a significant way. If you know of any or have any ideas please suggest them!
The SDK can be compiled against newer versions of the SDK or you can use newer versions of the Flash Player or AIR fairly easily. Several scripts have been written to help you do this so you don't have the patch the SDK by hand. These are in the develop branch of the SDK under the ide folder and are likely to make it into the 4.10 release. Generally adding support for a new version of Flash/AIR just means changing the minimum FP version and SWF versions in the flex and air config files and downloading the latest playerglobal.swc. > For instance, the Worker class is included in flash player 11.4, and Adobe > Flex 4.7 has full support of flash player 11.4. As the Apache Flex SDK is > overlaid on 4.7, how does a future flash player update, such as an addition > of a Worker1 class, become accessible to an apache flex developer? You would need to update the SDK to use this version of the Flash Player by editing the config files and downloading the latest playergloabl.swc. > To Terry's other point, it seems that he is implying that there isn't > complete accountability in testing for features. Is anyone working on test > reports, or requirement driven verification? Each release of Apache Flex will be tested with one or more versions of the Flash Player. Apache Flex 4.9.0 was tested on FP 11.1 and 11.4 and AIR 3.4. Apache Flex 4.10 will likely be tested with the latest version of Flash Player and AIR at the time of it's release. Currently we don't have the resources to test every release against every version of the Flash Player or make a new release whenever Adobe releases a new Flash Player/version of AIR. I don't know if Adobe tests Adobe Flex 4.6 against newer versions of the Flash Player when they release them. That being said it's very likely that Apache Flex 4.9 works with fine FP 11.6 and AIR 3.6 and support for both have already been added into the development branch. > Is there a quantitative measure of confidence, ie code coverage, 97% passing, > etc. Testing is done by running the Mustella test suite. It work by compiling and running swf files, interacting with them, taking screen shots and comparing them with a baseline run. I don't know what code coverage of the SDK it tests (lines or paths) but it is fairly comprehensive. The full set of tests take 6-8 hours to run and contains 14,000+ tests (although I'm not sure of exact number). There is a smaller group of check in tests and these are run via Jenkins on a CI machine when there's a check in to the develop branch. You can read more about Mustela here: https://cwiki.apache.org/FLEX/mustella-overview.html Thanks, Justin
