Debugging Flash in a Web Page
Last Updated on Friday, 29 January 2010 14:10 Written by Nicholas Dunbar
The Error Only Happends When Flash is in A Web Page.
If you are use to the debugger in Adobe Flash's IDE it can be real painful when you get an error that only shows up when running Flash in a web browser.
Also traces don't work in a web page. So what do you do? FireFlash is the answer. Based on the Firebug Mozilla plug-in for Firefox, FireFlash is a FireFox Addon that offers up a vial of virtual novocain to deaden the pain of web environment debugging. If you want to see traces from inside a web page or you want to browse Flash classes and objects this plug-in will be a God sent. Download it here:
Though the trace function in Flash is efficient and has lower processing overhead, its damn limiting. Who cares how slow it makes your application. If it helps you solve the bug, that is what really matters and then after which all you have to do is remove the trace statements before you go live with your site. It drives me crazy when I run trace(someArray) and I get back [Array]. What! give me the damn array as a list and if the array is an array of objects then give me the first set of children that live on those objects. Well my days of frustration are over now with FireFlash's release. Type in Console.log(someArray); and you get the damn list of values. Other features include support for printf:
connectionNum= 30;
Console.log("there are now %d connections open.",connectionNum);
and this prints out "there are now 30 connections open". Eureka!! These features work in the IDE in the output panel along with the traces as well as being sent to the Firebug console when your application is running in a web page.
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