Also, a superior model for industrial strength test frameworks comes from the ruby/rails world. whenever you create a new class, the platform creates (code generates) unit and functional tests, test fixtures to create test data, and connections to the test database.

with test data in place, unit testing is just that–no dependency on the backend server. and functional testing that makes round trips to the server, use data in a specially configured test database instance.

I launch the debug player via ANT, which writes the output of units tests to the flashlog.txt file. The python script picks that apart and creates an .xml file that can be imported via CruiseControl. ANT picks up a success/failure flag from the python script, and the ANT build fails if the python script reports that the test failed. Otherwise, the build succeeds, and CruiseControl incorporates the test results on the build result page.

It’s got a few moving parts, but I like it better than the socket server solution. If you’re looking to implement something yourself, have a look at Paul’s CI category: http://www.eyefodder.com/blog/continuous_integration/

make an ApolloTestRunner that can: - scan a path to collect *.as class - compile those class using mxmlc - dynamically load this external file into the TestRunner

if you look at how to run Java unit tests without Ant, you don’t need anything else than Java itself, for AS3 it should be the same imho.

When this is implemented, then you can hook Ant or any other process.

take a simple use case:

“I’m a user, I want to run tests while writing my code”

• any IDE than can run an external executable tool
• being able to pass as an argument to that exe the current class we want to test

then the classic - write tests - run (it fails) - write code and test till it does not fail

..repeat

just a basic stdOut back to the IDE should be enought to provide feedback.

Now, to make it automated in Ant, the perspective change, we already have an exe that take care of compiling the class and run the test on the class.

then taking this way, have the ApolloTestRunner exe feedback to Ant the JUnit XML report and use the JUnit task.

I plan to take this way with ASTUce, but I’m waiting an Apollo beta than can run exe :).

Perhaps some of Peter’s code could be used for these purposes too, but the problems it solves are the ones I want to do away with =)