First of all - I'd like to underline the fact that I'm not a QA expert, and that what I'm about to write might already be there.

How do you know what needs to be tested after you modify a line of code?

I've asked myself this question many times both as a developer and as a manager. Well - I just got an idea :)

Today we have code coverage tools, that can tell you what gets executed when you run something (like tests). Imagine that when a Quality Engineer would run a test, the system would automatically detect all the methods that were executed for that test, and it would log this in a database for further use.

Then, when a developer commits some new code into the versioning system, it would automatically identify the methods that the developer modified, and mark the matching test cases for regression.

What do you think about this?

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Adobe Romania has a blog: http://myadobe.ro/

On this blog, we have a page where we want to list all our job openings. But these job openings already exist on different websites, and we do not want to maintain the list each time the list changes.

So the first thing that crossed my mind was the HTMLDataSet from Spry. It allows you to build a Spry DataSet from an HTML Table.

As the list of jobs is on another website, we had to build a proxy to get it. We do it this way because of cross-domain scripting restrictions.

So after about 20 minutes of "hard" work, we have managed to implement it.

http://myadobe.ro/angajam/ (again, in Romanian) retrieves the job list from http://bestjobs.neogen.ro/?1=1&bj_nl_p=show_company&idco=29890&clid=1 through the proxy: http://myadobe.ro/includes/jobsproxy.php.

Bogdan

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OK, so yesterday I managed to play with the Adobe Help Viewer search results, and added extra-results from Yahoo.

Today I went even further and improved the help pages by bringing in comments from LiveDocs.

So right now, when I look at a specific help entry, I do not only get the "default" static content, but I also get comments if I'm online. So it looks like this:

(notice the comments at the bottom of the page)

How did I do this? Quite simple, using Spry. Again - the code is not perfect, but it works:

I opened the "help.js" file that is linked from all the help interfaces from here:

c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Help\en_US\Dreamweaver\9.0\help.js

And I added these lines at the end of the JS file:

document.write('<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="../../../../../../Adobe/Adobe Help Viewer/1.1/includes/xpath.js"></script>');
document.write('<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="../../../../../../Adobe/Adobe Help Viewer/1.1/includes/SpryData.js"></script>');
document.write('<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="../../../../../../Adobe/Adobe Help Viewer/1.1/includes/SpryEffects.js"></script>');
document.write('<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript" src="../../../../../../Adobe/Adobe Help Viewer/1.1/includes/getParams.js"></script>');

function unescapeHTML(str) {
    var div = document.createElement('div');
    div.innerHTML = str;
    return div.childNodes[0] ? div.childNodes[0].nodeValue : '';
}

window.onload = function() {
    var related_in = document.getElementById('related');
    if(related) {
        var webLink = related.getElementsByTagName('a')[0].getAttribute('href');
        var m = webLink.match(/http:\/\/help.adobe.com\/(.*)\/(.*)\/(.*)\/(.*)/);
        var locale = m[1];
        var product = m[2];
        var version = m[3];
        var page = m[4];
       
        related.innerHTML += '<div style="font-weight: bold; margin-top: 10px;">Comments - from livedocs</div>'+
        '<ul spry:region="dsCO" spry:repeatchildren="dsCO">'+
            '<li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">'+
                '<a href="{link}">{dc:creator} said on {dc:date}:</a>'+
                '<div>{description}</div>'+
            '</li>'+
        '</ul>'+
        '<button type="button" class="submit" alt="Add Comment" name="AddComment" value="Add Comment"  onclick=\'javascript:window.open("http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/livedocs/add_comment.cfm?filename='+page+'&book='+version+'&product='+locale+'&version='+product+'", "addcommentwin","directories=yes,toolbar=yes,menubar=yes,location=yes,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,status=yes");\'>Add Comment</button>';
        dsCO = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet(" http://livedocs.adobe.com/cfusion/rss/livedocs.cfm?product="+locale+"&version="+product+"&book="+version+"&full=true&page="+page, "/rdf:RDF/item");
        dsCO.sortOnLoad = 'dc:date';
       
        var obs = {onPostLoad: function(ds) {
            for (var i=0;i<ds.data.length;i++) {
                ds.data[i].description = unescapeHTML(ds.data[i].description);
            }
        }};
        dsCO.addObserver(obs);       
    }
}

This way, I have added this feature to the Dreamweaver CS3 help, but you can add it to other products as well (as long as they use the Adobe Help Viewer) buy modifying the help.js file from their corresponding folder. For example, for the "Extension Manager" you would have to modify this file:

"c:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Help\en_US\ExtensionManager\1.8\help.js" 

Enjoy!

Bogdan

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Here at Adobe I have to deal with multiple projects and products. One of them has to do with help, learning, and learning resources.

So while I was playing around with the Adobe Help Viewer today, I realized 2 things:

1. The search results (at least) is built using Spry
2. You can modify the search results page and add results from other sources

So I said - wow! I can split this in 2, and add some results from Google on the right side of the results screen!

So I opened the results.html file from C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Help Viewer\1.1\ and I started modifying it.

I modified the width and the float for the results list (in red is what I added):

Line 353: <div id="nav_content" width="46" style="width: 46%; float: left">

And added a new DIV at the end of the file, just before </body>:

Starting from line 463

<div style="width: 50%; float: left; border-left: 1px solid black; padding: 0 2px">
<p style="margin-top: 8px; font-weight: bold">Search results from Yahoo!:</p>
<script>
      var dsGG = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("http://search.yahooapis.com/WebSearchService/V1/webSearch?appid=YahooDemo&query={dsProducts::@name} {dsQuery::query}&results=20", "/ResultSet/Result");
</script>
<ol spry:region="dsGG" spry:repeatchildren="dsGG">
      <li style="margin-bottom: 10px;">
            <a href="{Url}" target="_blank">{Title}</a>
            <div>{Summary}</div>
      </li>
</ol>
</div>
</body>
</html>

As you can probably see, I ended up using Yahoo! search, not Google, because Google does not export XML results unless you have a client code or someth.

And the result is:

Bogdan

P.S. Ignore the CSS layout - it is just a proof of concept

P.S.2. It only works on Windows. I did not had the time to make it work on a MAC. Again, it's just a proof of concept

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After open-sourcing the Flash Player Scripting Engine - Tamarin in November last year, Adobe is now announcing its intention to open-source Flex.

"Adobe is announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using "Apollo".

Developers can use the Flex SDK to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using either Adobe Flex Builder or an IDE of their choice."

More on this topic:

• The announcement: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source
• Digg: http://digg.com/tech_news/Adobe_Flex_Goes_Open_Source
• Podcast: http://www.podtech.net/home/podtech/2826/breaking-news-adobe-flash-fle
• More on Flex: http://www.myfeedz.com/articles/tags/flex

Bogdan

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