exception

Flash Player 10.1 and global error handling

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript , , , ,

Well, it seems that the upcoming flashplayer 10.1 (first half of 2010?) has been completely designed to fill the gap that the current flashplayer has with the smartphones world (multitouch, accelerometer, screen orientation, sleep mode, out-of-memory management, etc..).

There will be a lot of new useful features, if you look at the release note pdf: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.pdf
But the most important feature, for me (as I asked a little time ago), is indeed the global error handling!
Unfortunately the global error handling feature hasn’t been already implemented in the current prerelease public version. I hope they will enable this feature soon, I really miss this option!


Add system excepthook in actionscript!

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript , , , ,

Imagine you’ve made a very huge flash application and many users will play with it every day.

Imagine they don’t have the flashplayer debug installed and at certain points they fall into undiscovered application bugs ( it’s impossible to have a real bug free application, we know this ).
Then, what happens? With the flashplayer debug installed you can see the traceback and you can also continue or dismiss the code execution. But without the debug player? The code will try to continue but probably at that point your application is broken and users will feel it more and more uncomfortable with it.
What I would like to have in flash, and probably you too, is a global system exception handling for those unhandled exception.
In this way you can both present the problem to your users and then also create a report system which will help you to improve and fix your own application!
Something like I did with SEPY years ago using the sys.excepthook of python:
When an exception is raised and uncaught, the interpreter calls sys.excepthook with three arguments, the exception class, exception instance, and a traceback object. In an interactive session this happens just before control is returned to the prompt; in a Python program this happens just before the program exits. The handling of such top-level exceptions can be customized by assigning another three-argument function to sys.excepthook.

Make your suggestion for the next Flash!

Alessandro Crugnola actionscript , , , ,

Hi, this message is for all Flash Users.
We’re collecting feedbacks and improvements, to turn subsequently to
Macromedia Flash Team, in order to obtain a wished list from who like you
use the program.
This operation has the sole scope to improve the development flash
enviroment and to adapt the software more to the requirements of the
customers.
You can propose new functionalities and improvements on those already
existing, trying to concentrate on aspects not too much general but on
detailed features lists that in your opinion lack or that you found
low-efficient for your daily job.

All messages should be sent to: flashwishlist@riadev.com

For example, some my suggestions:
– Improvements with XPath functionallity
– Regular expression implementation
– Make components smaller!
– Make a REAL try/catch implementation, expecially for runtime env