Adobe® Flex® 3 Bible

Chapter 6. Debugging Flex Applications

Flex Builder 3 includes powerful tools that allow you to easily debug and fine-tune your applications. Of course, software without bugs is a myth—at least at the beginning of a software development project. In many cases, the question of whether you complete your application within the time you originally estimate depends on how quickly you can find and fix an application's defects, or bugs.

As with many good integrated development environments, Flex Builder includes a variety of tools to help you find and fix an application's issues and understand what's happening inside the application at runtime, including these tools:

• The trace() function sends runtime messages to the Flex Builder console and other logging targets.

• The <mx:TraceTarget/> tag defines runtime tracing for network communications.

• Breakpoints suspend application execution and allow inspection of internal application state at runtime.

• Variable and expression tools allow you to inspect the value of various ActionScript expressions.

• Profiling tools allow you to see what's happening at runtime in terms of performance and memory usage.

In this chapter, I describe the tools you can use to debug and test your Flex applications.

Note

To use the sample code for this chapter, import the chapter06.zip Flex project archive file from the Web site files into your Flex Builder workspace.

Debugging Basics

Debugging simply means that when you run an application, you want special debugging information that ...