Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 71. Debugging Flex Applications

Developers need an assortment of tools and techniques for debugging Flex applications. This chapter aims to cover a broad selection of them, beginning with the debugging features built into Flex Builder, touching briefly on its command-line counterpart, and then continuing with server-side debugging, monitoring tools, gathering diagnostic information through logging, and debugging bindings.

Overview

The influential Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra famously wrote, "If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in." And many years later, the same can still be said. Even the most diligent of developers, with an extensive suite of unit tests and a green coverage report, will still write code with at least some bugs in it.

These bugs come in many shapes and sizes, from incorrect expressions and faulty algorithms to omitted code or dependencies on third-party libraries, which themselves contain bugs. There are even bugs within the Flex framework that surface from time to time to cause some mischief. It's because of the sheer variety of bugs and the various ways they reveal themselves that developers need to be equipped with many different tools and techniques for identifying and resolving them.

This chapter covers several approaches to debugging Flex applications, beginning with the Flex Debugging perspective built into Flex Builder, then covering a selection of complementary techniques from ...