LBi Logger

Here in LBi London, as you can see, we are refining our tools to improve our productivity on create, debug and handover our software. An area I felt it could be improved was the debugging.

There are different interesting solutions to debug projects, someone really interesting. Xray, for instance, permits to browse your entire movie and check all the properties of the elements. It contains inside also a simple logger. I've been used to use traces to debug applications, probably also because I find disturbing having to browse all the application structure to get to an item. I believe that logging is still a good way to debug or test applications but that it is an area where the solutions available are not really satisfying or that could be easily improved. Our main IDE is Eclipse, and the two loggers I tested are NTail and LogWatcher. They are quite popular and they can satisfy most of the need when reading logs, but Flash applications, for instance, because of their complexity (they can involve data management, animations, user interactions) can generate quite big and messy logs. My goal was thus to provide a logger to easily organize visually the logs, this can happen adding runtime setting setup (to define log styles to particular logs) and adding some interactivity, like for instance the filtering of Alessandro's FlashTracer.

LBi Logger is a "Highly customizable and interactive Eclipse plug-in to view log files".

The project is still on its early stages, I'm using it daily and since I would like to keep it simple, also for performance reasons, I want to be sure about a feature's need before adding it.

If it sounds interesting to you please have a look at the project page and if you think it can be improved, please tell us your ideas.

Introduction to LBi Useful

We have started off with three projects hosted on Google Code. I will introduce the AS2 libraries here and let Marcus and Christian introduce their projects when they get a moment.

ActionScript 2 Libraries

The ActionScript 2 libraries are modified from libraries that we originally started developing about two years ago when we started working entirely outside the Flash IDE and using Eclipse and FDT with SWFMill and MTASC instead. This was a drastic improvement to our Flash development workflow and is essential for working in teams, as well as providing a solid backbone on which to apply best practices and design patterns from Java and Ruby. Internally we have been using the legacy versions of these libraries (in a com.framfab package rather than the neater and happier com.lbi package :)) but I have refactored out the best bits into the libraries you will find here. I have put as much as possible under test (you can run the unit tests by entering 'rake test' from the project folder - you'll need ruby and rake installed first).

Please note that there may be some bugs in the newly refactored code that will be ironed out over the next few weeks as we officially move over internally to the new codebase.

There are a few basic usage examples for the animation package, and I will publish an introduction to setting up a good environment for those who don't have experience working with MTASC and third-party libraries. In the meantime, here are some useful places to go to get started and get advice:

• osflash.org/ - hub of the open source Flash community
• www.asserttrue.com - Luke Bayes' blog (co-developer of the asunit library and Sprouts)
• There are plenty of other people I should mention, but I am short of time when it comes to hunting down links...