The AIR 1.5 update to Adobe’s flagship RIA platform is here,
and with it a host of new features to supercharge your development. In
this article we’ll look at the fantastic new debugging system,
available in the Aptana IDE. Once again there will be a quiz at the
end, so pay attention! The first 200 people to submit their answers will receive a copy of The Adobe Flash Platform ActionScript Reference for Rich Internet Application Development (that’s the print version) delivered to their door for free, thanks to Adobe.
Getting Started
Before we begin, make sure you have the latest update to Aptana and
to the AIR plugin. You can install these using the instructions in our previous AIR article, under the section, A Powerful Tool for Building AIR Apps.
The latest updates are critical for this tutorial; if in doubt, restart Aptana and check for updates using Help > Check for Aptana Updates Now. You should have at least Aptana Studio 1.2.1 and the Apollo/AIR plugin 1.2.1. Use Help > About Aptana Studio to check your Aptana version, and click on the brown box to check your Aptana AIR version.
Everything we need to take the debugger for a spin is included.
We’ll be using the Adobe AIR 1.5 application template, the AIR
Introspector framework, and the jQuery framework.
What’s New?
The AIR 1.0 release included a useful but limited debugging tool in the AIR HTML
Introspector. With the new tools in the AIR 1.5 debug launcher, Aptana
has managed to recreate the debugging workflow in Aptana Studio, and
provide step-by-step debugging, breakpoints, watches, and more. In this
tutorial, we’ll run through how to debug AIR projects from start to
finish. Veteran AIR developers can skip ahead to the Debugging on
Wheels section.