This is a good read that I would forward to anyone who wanted to know why AJAX can not do everything. Having built Flex/Flash content that will run in the Flash Player, I already knew much of these arguments but the article does a really good job of organizing the strengths, weaknesses, and commonalities between the two approaches of delivering information on the client side.

“…in real-wold use, Flex typically requires less coding to build the same or better functionality. The learning curve is higher, but the development times are significantly lower. “

Read the article here at Anthony Franco’s Blog.

Rather than inserting trace() statements all over your code, forgetting where you put them, and then let another developer decrypt them or worse, obfuscate another developer from trying to understand the output, you ought to train yourself to use the Eclipse-style debugger.

It’s simple enough that you set up your breakpoints and then run the main file under the Debugger perspective. At runtime, the program will halt at the breakpoint and yield you a model of all the objects in memory at that time in the Variables tab of the Debugger perspective. The Debugger UI gives you a great amount of control of how deep you want to drill into the object model at the time the program is frozen. Press the “Play” button to resume control flow which will continue until the next breakpoint.

Once you’re done analyzing your problem, you can hit the “Clear All Breakpoints” to clear all the points of debugging interests in your application. It’s a quick and dirty approach without investing into logging.

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In related news, Mike Morearty is delivering a presentation on the Flex Builder Debugger at 360 Flex @ Seattle …

About me (Mike Morearty)

I’m a Senior Computer Scientist at Adobe. Since I’m a scientist, I always wear a white lab coat. I currently work on Flex Builder, the IDE for Flex. I work primarily on the debugger portion of the product. I have a fondness for debuggers. Before Adobe, I spent ten years at Microsoft, where (among other things) I worked on Visual Studio’s debugger for a number of years.