HistoryOfFlexUnit

The History of FlexUnit

The team at Adobe Consulting, who initially built FlexUnit, have been the earliest advocates of unit testing and test driven development in the world of Rich Internet Applications.

The first unit testing framework for ActionScript and RIA development was AS2Unit, and was developed for the RIA community by Alistair McLeod (previously at iteration::two, now at Adobe Consulting). When Flex 1.0 was released, the same team released FlexUnit, borne out of AS2Unit, and with a graphical test runner for the Flex development environment.

The release of Flex 2, which introduced ActionScript 3, meant that another migration was required, and a team from Adobe Product Engineering and the Adobe Developer Relations team performed this and released another version, this time on Adobe Labs. To allow community contributors, the project was thereafter moved to Google Code, under the name as3flexunit.

In August 2008, FlexUnit moved back to Adobe, and now resides on Adobe Open Source, providing source control via Subversion, the ability to submit bugs and feature requests via JIRA, and forums to accomodate discussions.

In late 2008, the teams at Adobe Consulting and Digital Primates began working on a new version of FlexUnit which would combine the strengths of the previous version with advances in both the Java and Flex unit testing communities. This new version was named FlexUnit 4 as it had comparable features to JUnit 4.

The FlexUnit4 was released to alpha in May of 2009 and beta in August of 2009. The first release candidate of FlexUnit 4 was released in December of 2009.

FlexUnit Contributors

The following people have been the main contributors to the FlexUnit .9 codebase, as it has evolved from AS2Unit, through Flex Unit for Actionscript 2 and Flex 1.5 and thereafter migrated to work with ActionScript 3 for subsequent releases of Flex.

• Alistair McLeod
• Matt Chotin
• Daniel Dura
• Tom Ruggles
• Jason Williams
• Xavi Beumala

FlexUnit4 Contributors

There is a vibrant and growing community around FlexUnit 4. You can find a complete view by looking at the FlexUnit network on GitHub.