Easytech blog

Sometimes when programming, you have to debug your application. Yes, even when using Adobe Flex. The problem (and on the other hand, the good thing) is, that living in a Linux world makes you the one responsible for enabling every feature you need.

In this case, as mentioned, the feature I needed was to enable the trace() method for debugging Flex applications. To achieve this is actually quite simple. You just have to create a file in your home folder, named mm.cfg. When enabled, tracing is done automatically to the file $HOME/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs/flashlog.txt (you can, however, modify this location in the mm.cfg file).

The content of a simple, yet functional mm.cfg file sample is given below.

TraceOutPutFileName=$HOME/.macromedia/Flash_Player/Logs/flashlog.txt
ErrorReportingEnable=1
TraceOutputFileEnable=1

There is one more caveat though. The trace() method only works when viewing your flash application in a debugging-enabled
version of the Flash Player (or the flash plugin in mozilla).

As an added bonus, there is a plugin for Firefox, Flash Tracer, that will display a sidebar with the output of the trace() calls. This can be quite handy so not to have to open a terminal just for viewing the log file.

Now that you know the truth, off you go, and happy debugging!

Lately I’ve been playing a lot with Adobe Flex so I thought it would be a good idea to show you how to setup the Flex SDK on your Linux box and get you going with this cool technology. In case you haven’t heard, Flex is a framework to write Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Using XML and Actionscript 3.0, you can write rich internet applications which use webservices to communicate with a backend. The programs are compiled using the Flex compiler into an SWF file. Read on to setup Flex under linux…

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