I usually use the built-in debugger in Flex Builder accompanied with FlashTracer (when I’m not running in debug mode and/or in prod depending on some query string params I toss in) to debug my Flex applications, but my buddy John pointed me to this new plugin for Firebug for FireFox called ThunderBolt; it provides the usual trace statements like FlashTracer with some additional features like a tree for complex objects and a memory snapshot. I don’t want to repeat what the site already says about it, so I’m just going to provide a link to get you there.
Since I’m on the topic of debugging I thought I’d also add in my other handy weapon of choice: ServiceCapture. It’s a simple HTTP proxy that catches all your data going across the wire (from flex to your server and back); the really cool part is that allows you to inspect your request and response objects of any of the following types: plan text, xml, web services, and AMF (the binary protocol used to perform Flash Remoting or Java-RPC in Flex).
I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on this, so what are you using?
I’m currently using FireFox, FlashTracer, FireBug and Charles as my proxy but I do like ServiceCapture. The thing that constantly surprises me is that a lot of people out there don’t know about these tools. Even people I’m working with that have been doing this stuff for years! What are they using or do they just write perfect code!?