jun :: realeyes

February 28th, 2008

Flex 3 BYOP: Bring your own profiler…flash.sampler

So during my presentation at 360Flex some people had questions about accessing the profiler without Flex Builder 3 Professional. Being completely swamped on projects of late and not getting too much time to read extra material, I told them that there probably wasn’t but talk to David Zuckerman to find out if the API to the Profiler is exposed in Flex Builder…or something to that extent. Although I think this would have been more in Mike Morearty’s or Tom Reilly’s court…

Well, unfortunately it looks like the Profiler is not accessible through an Eclipse based API… heres a tidbit according to Ted Patrick from a little while back:

“the code model and language intelligence features are there for you to extend and build upon. Eclipse is designed from the ground up to support plug-in extensibility and we have exposed these APIS for you to extend.”

Here’s the link to the info above:

http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/09/flex-3-beta-2-code-debug-profiler.php

Now for the best part about this post…here is some late breaking news, and so far I don’t think anyone yet has blogged about it. Although it’s late…I need to sleep…and I haven’t fully digested all the specifics yet, if you’re cool with some caveats you get a pretty awesome new package to play with and build your own Profiler!!!

Here are the caveats:

You have to run the app in debug mode. (Specifically 9.0.115.0)
You need to make use of PreloadSwf in the mm.cfg file to preload any custom profiling agent.

So…if you’re cool with that…drum roll please…I now announce the flash.sampler.* package!

Here’s some links for those of you who find this interesting:

Hey Doug…you feel like adding another tab to your custom FlexSpy?

Night all…

Posted in Debugging, Flex Builder Profiler, Memory Management | 2 Comments

2 Responses

Mike Morearty Says:
February 28th, 2008 at 10:49 am

Hi Jun, you’re right that not many people realize there is a public API to get profiler data; thanks for pointing it out. Tom is the wizard behind that code.

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Mike,

To be quite honest with you since the debugging improvements you’ve made in Flex Builder 3 I can’t remember the last time I had to write a trace statement. The right click functionality, and all the other cool features of the debug perspective are intensely awesome! That being said, the Flex Profiler and even the API exposure is just icing on the icing on the cake.

Thank you, Tom, David, and everyone else on the Builder team for your hard work on this most triumphant release!

Mike Morearty Says:
February 28th, 2008 at 12:24 pm

That’s really great to hear, and thanks so much for the kind words!