ActionScript Logging

Logging: The practice of recording sequential data, often chronologically.

Personally I find it as exciting as watching a rugby match when only one team turns up to play - but every project I've worked on needed it; usually to assuage the otherwise painfully lengthy process of tracking down bugs in production code.

With my current Flash game project the need for moving beyond the trace command in the Flex Builder 3 debugger hit when I needed to test multiple players interacting on the same server.

As you can imagine the constraining of my enthusiasm for such a task was a herculean effort but somehow I managed to curb my impulse to roll my own logging solution. In fact my desperate and frenzied scouring of the open source AS3 logging solutions turned up a couple of notable contenders.

I was fist enamored with ThunderboltAS3 and its integration with Firebug; a rockin’ Firefox extension that I never leave home without. Alas Firefox is not the only browser I need to test on and the Thunderbolt console poo-pooed on Windows XP.


Fortunately I ran across Arthropod by Carl Calderon.


This little gem fits all my rudimentary criteria:

• Has its own logging console.
• Has colour coding.
• ActionScript 3.0 – no flex framework needed.
• Runs on Windows XP
  

All-in-all I’m pretty happy with it after a week of use and it allows me to move on to my next conundrum.