Dovyski » debug http://www.dovyski.com Pointless things somehow useful Fri, 07 May 2010 02:42:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 SWFConsole: enhance the power of your Flash games http://www.dovyski.com/2009/07/swfconsole-enhance-the-power-of-your-flash-games/ http://www.dovyski.com/2009/07/swfconsole-enhance-the-power-of-your-flash-games/#comments Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:51:03 +0000 Dovyski http://www.dovyski.com/?p=2098 Continue reading →]]> TerminalSometime ago I was working on a Flash game and I had to output some information to the console. That's a very easy task when you use trace() and the Flash IDE, but things get a little harder when you need to output text inside the browser.

Looking for a tool that could help me output text, I found SWFConsole.  It is a free developer tool for Flash AS3 projects that gives you output in all environments, not just the IDE. You can type commands in order  to manipulate Movieclips in the stage,  such as myMovieclip.alpha = 0.3.

SWFConsole also has a built in resource monitor that shows FPS and memory usage, pretty useful for game developers. I miss some features as listeners to handle custom commands and a method to "enable/disable" the console instead of  showing or hiding  it, but it does not make  the tool less useful.

If you are a Flash game developer, SWFConsole can make your life easier!

]]> http://www.dovyski.com/2009/07/swfconsole-enhance-the-power-of-your-flash-games/feed/ 0 Profiling and debugging PHP http://www.dovyski.com/2009/04/profiling-and-debugging-php/ http://www.dovyski.com/2009/04/profiling-and-debugging-php/#comments Sun, 26 Apr 2009 04:59:19 +0000 Dovyski http://www.dovyski.com/?p=83 Continue reading →]]>

Reviewing the code is an important task every programmer must (or should) perform. Sometimes the program you have just coded looks nice and fast, because all the tests you have performed using your well-controlled devel0pment sandbox showed no errors.

Unless you are a god when programming, you may have left some little performance tweaks behind. Most of the time you can replace several method calls with the returned value stored in a variable, or avoiding nested for/whiles, or freeing a result set in order to save some memory, etc. In the end, all those tweaks can make the difference between a smooth user experience and an extremely painful development problem.

If you are a PHP developer, you can use the free PHP Quick Profiler (PQP) to help profiling and debugging your code. No more echoing vars, objects or queries in order to find performance mistakes. Using an automated tool to show you what is going on, you can save a lot of time and ensure your app is stable and fast. I read about PQP at WebAppers these days. They also have a screenshot (below) and a link for a demo.

PHP Profiler

If you want more options for profiling and debugging, I recommend Xdebug, which is a very powerful tool. We have been using it at Decadium for a long time.  Some of the features include stack traces and function traces in error messages (with full parameter display, function/file name and line indications), information about memory allocation and protection for infinite recursions.

Xdebug is also free and has support for Windows and Linux.

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