Month: March 2010

FlashTracer for Firebug

Alessandro Crugnola firefox , , , , , , , ,
FBTracer in action

Recently I decided to write my old flash tracer firefox extension from scratch because I found it not really useful (at least for me) and too “expensive”, moreover when using firebug at the same time.

So I made a quick test to see how much was hard to create a new panel inside firebug to display flash tracer.
This is the result of what I did right now. It does not have all the features of the old extension, it just display the flash traces. Anyway it is actually in early stage development, updates will come during next days.
Here the instructions and the download link (remrmber to install the flashplayer debugger and firebug first!):
P.S. It has been tested on osx snow leopard and windows 7 right now.

Flex sdk 3.5.0 problem with ternary operators

Alessandro Crugnola flex , , , , , ,
I’ve got problems to isolate the problem into a very big project with many linked sources. After hours inspecting and commenting lines of code trying to figure out the reason why flex gave me an “internal error” I found the problem.
This very simple script was crashing the flex compiler if using the 3.5.0 sdk ( revision 3.5.0.12683 ).
Fortunately the 4.0.0 compiler works fine. At the end it seems to be the combination of “+” and “-” and the ternary operator.
package
{
   import flash.display.Sprite;
   public class ternary_test extends Sprite
   {
      public function ternary_test()
      {
         var n: Number = 0;
         var d: int = 3;
         var k: int = 5;
         var j: int = 10;
         n = 1 + ( -( d == 0 ? k : j ) );
         trace( "n=" + n );
      }
   }
}

will cause the compiler to crash with the following stack trace:

compile:

    [mxmlc] Loading configuration file /Applications/Adobe Flash Builder 4 Plug-in/sdks/3.5.0/frameworks/flex-config.xml

    [mxmlc] Error: null

    [mxmlc] java.lang.NullPointerException

    [mxmlc] 	at macromedia.asc.semantics.ConstantEvaluator.evaluate(ConstantEvaluator.java:1290)

    [mxmlc] 	at macromedia.asc.parser.UnaryExpressionNode.evaluate(UnaryExpressionNode.java:51)

    [mxmlc] 	at macromedia.asc.semantics.ConstantEvaluator.evaluate(ConstantEvaluator.java:2153)

    [mxmlc] 	at macromedia.asc.parser.ListNode.evaluate(ListNode.java:44)

    [mxmlc] 	at macromedia.asc.semantics.ConstantEvaluator.evaluate(ConstantEvaluator.java:1497)

    [mxmlc] 	at macromedia.asc.parser.BinaryExpressionNode.evaluate(BinaryExpressionNode.java:56)

    [mxmlc] 	at macromedia.asc.semantics.ConstantEvaluator.evaluate(ConstantEvaluator.java:2124)

    [mxmlc] 	at macromedia.asc.parser.ArgumentListNode.evaluate(ArgumentListNode.java:45)...