Netbeans, Aptana and Debugging AIR Apps

admin — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 03:07:54 +0000

It’s been a while since Aptana 2.0 came out. I ignored it till version 2.02 was out. As usually happens with most software, what worked in previous versions doesn’t work in the new version. Now if this had been with version 2.0, you could have just said someone forgot to do a regression test but not so with 2.02

So what doesn’t work? The Adobe AIR debugger. It gets stuck at ‘Launching New_Configuration’ and this dialog pops up without the air app starting up.

Sounds like a socket error but this is running on localhost and all my ports are open to the local machine. As usual when I run into a problem there is nothing on google and there is nothing on the log file. At this stage I would gladly switch to Netbeans. I use for almost everything other than air. Unfortunatley I never figured out how to use the netbeans debugger with AIR. Couldn’t find any howto either.

Next I came across a reference to a third party debugger that you can use with any AIR app, regardless of the IDE that you use. It looks like a great project. Unfortunately the developers forget to create some documentation. There isn’t even a getting started guide.

I am on holiday so I am doing this on my Mac the only options available are to go back to version 1.5 or to wait till I get back home next week.

Adobe Air on Linux

admin — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 12:31:16 +0000

A struggled for a while to get Adobe Air installed on my fedora 11 box, so that I may run TweetDeck. Finally I did get it running and was happily using TweetDeck for a short while. Well it was only minutes. Then they released a TweetDeck update. After the update was installed TweetDeck wouldn’t start up again. At the time I was busy with other things so I forgot about it for a while. In the meantime, I installed Aptana along with the Adobe Air plugin.

I am switching to Adobe Air because JavaFX as a failed technology. Air impressed at first look. It felt as though I could take to Air like a duck taking to water – that’s the way it should have been with JavaF(ailed)X but it wasn’t. After playing with Air/Aptana for a while, I put it on the back burner and returned to it today. Now my first weak attempt at creating an air application seems to have fallen into a black hole. Soon as you hit the run button, Aptana blinks but nothing happens. The application doesn’t run and there is nothing in the console. Other than the rather unhelpfull message that the application has terminated. After hitting the run button another half a dozen times, I decided to run it manually using ADL. Lo and Behold there is a more informative message:

Application crashed with an unhandled SIGSEGV
Crashlog has been dumped in /tmp/airCrashLogs/0720_1545_U87bom

It was then that I looked into the /tmp/airCrashlogs folder and found it full of them. While the log is human readable, there wasn’t anything in it that this human could understand. At the top there is a list of libraries that have been loaded as long as your arm:

00110000-0013e000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 161955                             /lib/libssl3.so
0013e000-00140000 rw-p 0002d000 08:02 161955                             /lib/libssl3.so
00140000-00142000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 108463                             /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libpk-gtk-module.so
00142000-00143000 rw-p 00001000 08:02 108463                             /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libpk-gtk-module.so
00143000-00220000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 14617                              /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00220000-00221000 rw-p 000dd000 08:02 14617                              /lib/libglib-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00223000-00226000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 5004                               /lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00226000-00227000 rw-p 00002000 08:02 5004                               /lib/libgmodule-2.0.so.0.2000.3
00229000-0022d000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 161964                             /lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.2000.3
0022d000-0022e000 rw-p 00003000 08:02 161964                             /lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0.2000.3
0022e000-00232000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 103228                             /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so
00232000-00233000 rw-p 00003000 08:02 103228                             /usr/lib/gtk-2.0/modules/libcanberra-gtk-module.so
00233000-002c2000 r-xp 00000000 08:02 102488                             /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.3.20
002c2000-002c6000 rw-p 0008e000 08:02 102488                             /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6.3.20

Right at the bottom is the business end of the crashlog. There it has this bit of information:

/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xe7c082]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xe70572]
[0x161410]

/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca37cb]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca3811]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xca4a19]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xd8499e]
[0xf48f6714]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5b638]
[0xf450bf66]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xfaee1c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5b638]
[0xf45089c8]

/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xfaee1c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf5cea1]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xf7546c]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xdc771d]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xdc789e]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xc045fa]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so [0xc1704f]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/../runtimes/air/linux/Adobe AIR/Versions/1.0/libCore.so(ADLEntryMain+0xd8) [0xc17366]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/adl(__gxx_personality_v0+0x3ab) [0x8048bf3]
/lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe6) [0x8e8a66]
/usr/local/Aptana Studio 1.5/plugins/com.aptana.ide.framework.apollo.linux_1.5.0.v20081116/sdk/bin/adl(__gxx_personality_v0+0x49) [0x8048891]

Again this is nothing that I could make use of. So I tried running the application from the command line using adl only to run into the same error. Next up I tried running it as root and it worked! Now this app is nothing more than a simple hello world. It worked perfectly the last time I ran it but today it will not run. Same goes with TweetDeck, one time it was working fine but now it also causes a core dump. Of course the culprit here is the Air runtime rather than TweetDeck or Aptana or even my own hello world. Wish they would fix it soon or at least provide a less verbose but more usefull error message so that I can figure it out.

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Netbeans, Aptana and Debugging AIR Apps

Adobe Air on Linux