An Open Source Gorilla In The Mists

Back in April I wrote about a Colorado based company called Gorilla Logic.  They develop Rich Internet Applications and Mobile Apps.  Driven partially at least by their own needs, they have also developed a suite of automated testing tools for iPhone, iPad, Adobe Air and Flex. The tools fill a critical void in testing and Q&A for this fast growing segment of the app market. Now the company that says one gorilla is better than 10 monkeys, has released a major upgrade of their flagship testing tool FlexMonkey.

FlexMonkey 5 has a long list of major improvements over previous versions. Among them are:

• A new console interface
• A new test execution model based on FlexUnit 4
• New SetProperty, StoreValue, and CallFunction commands providing increased power and expressiveness without modifying Actionscript
• A new test-code generation model, friendlier to customization of generated code
• Plus hundreds of other changes driven by real-world feedback from the FlexMonkey community and Gorilla Logic’s customers 

The open source FlexMonkey is the most widely used tool for testing Adobe Air and Flex applications. It has become the de facto standard in the market.  It is good to see an open source tool stake claim to this standard.

FlexMonkey is just one of the tools in the testing suite which Gorilla Logic brings to market as open source.  Along with FlexMonkey they have recently released version 5 of FoneMonkey which provides similar testing tools for iPhone and iPad development.

I spoke to co-founder and VP of engineering for Gorilla Logic, Ed Schwarz about the new releases and business in general. Schwarz is very excited about the new releases. They really represent the culmination of a lot of work by his team based upon what they heard from the community.  While Gorilla Logic’s application development business continues to grow rapidly, they love the idea of “eating their own dog food” by using the FoneMonkey and FlexMonkey products. The testing tools really make their lives easier.

With no slow down in site on mobile and rich internet application development it looks like both Gorilla Logic and their open source testing tools will continue their success.