Debugging Flash/Flex remoting with AppPuncher
A few days ago a new remoting debugger hit the market. The Midnight Coders, more famous for WebOrb released AppPuncher. Now I don’t normally do product reviews but this is one handy tool, so I thought I would share.
AppPuncher Interface
Working with Flash/Flex remoting can be a difficult process, esspecially to debug. You can have alot of factors that contribute to the success of the application and not all can be debugged from inside Flex builder or other debuggers. Up until now I have been using a product called Charles which has done the job very well and had support for AMF structures, but I have now switched to AppPuncher.
Why? Well apart from a few hiccups with the Mac version at the beginning, AppPuncher has been proving itself as a very useful tool. AppPuncher is targeted at Flex/Flash remoting. You can re-invoke the same calls to the server again from within the debugger, without having to touch the flash based application. You can live edit the AMF objects coming in or going out of the debugger to try and fix any issues (this is esspecially handy if you have a non Flash/Flex person developing the server side). Filtering of captured/displayed data is great too. So many of the other alternatives capture and display every request which leaves you having to wade through the masses of automated requests from Google toobars etc to find your service calls.
Talking to the people at The Midnight Coders, they have told me there are A LOT more features coming, and that this is a very early release. New features like, Regression tests from recorded sessions, Code coverage tests and load testing, which is something often hard to test as there are no RTMP based tools for this. Also possibly a lot more tie-in to their server product WebOrb, which will help clients diagnose and work through issues.
If you have always wanted to be able to do something, or wanted a proxy/debugger application to do “XYZ” then now is probably the time to ping The Midnight Coders and let them know while they are still in the development stage. You might get lucky and find the feature in the next release.
For a complete list of features and plenty of images showing the interface head on over to the product page and trial it for FREE! AppPuncher Product page.
