Ionut Grosu

This is an idea that came to me long time ago and finally had some time to implement it.

It’s an ascii video player. Check it out

DEMO HERE ! (Right click for source)

I find it as an useless but cool idea. But still, if anyone finds a use for this and is interested in the source code, let me know and i’ll post some code and details.

[Updated] - added the view source option.

At last, my first tech post. : )

Here’s a way to ease the debugging into flex. I’ve created a simple class which takes advantage of the getStackTrace() method of the Error class and traces the calling function name before any debug message.

package com.ionutgrosu.logging
{
import mx.utils.ObjectUtil;
/**
 * @author Ionut Grosu ( http://www.flexwizz.com )
 * Simple Debug Util Class
 */
public final class Logger
{
	/**
	 * enable logging
	 */
	public static var isDebug : Boolean = true;

	/**
	 * Traces a message
	 * @param str
	 * @param introspect Set this to true if you want the 1st param to be introspected
	 */
	public static function log(str : * = '', introspect : Boolean = false):void
	{
		if(!isDebug) return;
		if(introspect) str = ObjectUtil.toString(str);

		trace(getCallingFunction(new Error())+ str);
	}
	/**
	 * @private
	 */
	private static function getCallingFunction(err:Error):String
	{
	return (err.getStackTrace().split("at ")[2].split("()")[0]+'()').replace('/',".") + "  ";
	}
}
}

You simply use it like Logger.log(”message”) and check the output. Should look similar to appName.componentId.blabla.functionName() “message”.

Of course, you can step in deeper and redirect the output to a custom log target, filter messages and so on. But I’ll come back on this with a more compressive code built on top of logging framework which needs a little cleanup.

Note that the getStackTrace() method is only available in the debug version of flash player so you should disable the logger class when exporting a release version. A single call to getStackTrace() will usually crash the application with no errors. So make sure that you set isDebug to false before any log() calls when releasing.

Cheers.