Debug Flash Applications with FireBug and ThunderBolt

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At the on AIR tour in Berlin I just saw a really cool project called Thunderbolt by Jens Krause that lets you debug Flash applications in the browser using the very popular Firebug plugin. The project is an open source project and it’s hosted on Google code. It makes it really, really simple to get debug output and errors right inside of the Firebug browser interface.

Thunderbolt

For those of you not using Firebug you can also get an AIR version of the console that lets you send the output from a Flash application to an AIR app. It’s also open source and works pretty much the same way. The source code for that is also available. The application uses a combination of Flex and HTML and makes use of the YUI Tree component to display the output.

It’s another one of the great OSFlash projects so if you haven’t checked out OSFlash, you definitely should. There’s a ton of stuff going on in the open source Flash world.

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  3. Flash Platform Week in Review (Mar 4 – Mar 10)
  4. Multi-touch Flash (Think Microsoft Surface with Actionscript 3)
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  • http://fupeg.blogspot.com Michael Galpin

    Does this do anything besides echo the trace log? I’ve been using FlashTracer for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3469. You don’t need FireBug for it, but it could be a lot smarter. You have to tell it where the trace log is, though you would think that it could find it based on your OS, etc.

  • http://www.mikebritton.com Mike Britton

    The best thing about this tool is you can get debug info in Thunderbird for all of it: form posts, javascript, and all passing of data back and forth between Flash and server-side / middle tier.

  • http://penpalsjpg.com Penpals

    That’s great news. I’ve been using Firebug for a quite long time now and it’s great that it now supports Flash. That was the only one thing missing.

    And speakin gof OSFlash projects – I recommend you all the SILEX project :)

  • http://blog.iconara.net Theo

    Integrating with Firebug isn’t harder than ExternalInterface.call(“console.log”, “Hello Firebug”) but it seems like they have a whole logging framework too.