Introducing Debugging Techniques

Finding and correcting bugs is part of application development. This lesson will give you additional tools to do just that. This lesson is different from other lessons in that you will not write code, but instead use debugging tools with existing code to learn about ways to help you debug your applications.

In the first section of the lesson, you will use the <mx:StackTrace> tag to give you insight into what communication is happening between the client and server when using functionality that accesses server-side data such as RemoteObject, HTTPService, and Flex Data Services (FDS).

Next, you will see some new ways to use the debugger that you have not yet explored in this book. You will also get some more explanation and vocabulary about the Flex Builder's built-in debugger.

Finally, you will learn how to handle errors that occur during run time. Most likely, you will not be able to correct every bug and anticipate every way a user will interact with your application, so it is possible that run-time errors could occur. To handle these run-time errors, you will learn how to use try-catch-finally statements to gracefully catch and recover from run-time errors.

Note

You need to have both FDS and ColdFusion running in console windows for the following tasks.