Nicolas Schudel » Debugging http://nicolasschudel.name Balancing Design and Development in Online Media Sun, 09 May 2010 08:42:26 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 1001 Ways to Debug in Flash http://nicolasschudel.name/1001-ways-to-debug-in-flash/ http://nicolasschudel.name/1001-ways-to-debug-in-flash/#comments Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:10:26 +0000 Nicolas http://nicolasschudel.name/?p=15 I have been looking around at all the different ways to debug content when developing Flash applications. The Flex folks already have a decent way of doing this, since the debug version of the Flash player communicates everything back to the Flexbuilder IDE. In Flash it's not that easy. As soon as the SWF is being run from within a browser all those Trace statements don't get through anymore.

]]> I have checked out something like over 1000 different ways (number inflated for more drama) to debug Flash content within the browser and picked out the following 4 decent tools:

SOS looked sweet for a moment, because it used an XML Socket for the Logging statements. However I ran into some cross-domain issues on an external development server, so I put it aside. The Flash Tracer plugin for Firefox would have been sweeeet, but I gave up trying to get it work in Firefox 3. Xray is a debugging behemoth. I didn’t quit like having to include a connector component to my SWF. All these debuggers are pretty darn good, but they all involved some twisted procedures to get them up and running. I then stumbled across a super simple answer to my browser debugging issue. Why not just do what the Javascript guys do? Trace it out to Firebug like this: 

ExternalInterface.call("console.log","test");

It’s so simple it can’t be wrong. There is just an issue that I have to decide if I want to use Flash’s built in trace function or the Firebug log while debugging. This however is taken care of buy Thunderbolt. It is a simple class that notices if Firebug is accessible and otherwise uses trace. Thunderbolt also has a “hide” option built in, for when the SWF goes live.

Conclusion

The Firebug / Thunderbolt combo is an elegant way to debug Flash content in both the Flash IDE and in Firefox. For a quick introduction to Thunderbolt, check out the Article 10 tips and tricks using ThunderBolt AS3, by Thunderbolt’s author Jens Krause.

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