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Table of contents:

• What's new
• AMF Overview
• Installation
  • Check List
  • Installing AMFPHP
  • First Service
  • AMFEXT
  • Gateway.php
• Service Browser
  • Installation
  • Security
• Fundamentals
  • Security
  • Datatypes
  • Class Mapping
  • Sessions
• Creating Services
  • Getting Started
• Debugging
• Debugging primer
• PHP error logs
• Debugging proxies
  
• Tutorials
  • Strings
  • Arrays
  • Datagrid
  • Date/Time
  • Blob
  • VO's
• AMFPHP Development
  • Development Roadmap
  • SVN Access

Debugging Proxies

While the NetConnection debugger does the job when you start to use Remoting, you will soon realize that it's a bit buggy and slow. Among the bugs you will encounter are long strings appearing over the interface instead of being properly masked, lack of responsiveness when dealing with lots of remoting calls, and an inability to show more than 40k of data per call (not strictly a bug but rather a limitation of LocalConnection).

Using a debugging proxy can be of tremendous help. Written in Java, they are generally much more responsive than the NetConnection debugger. They intercept calls between a client and the server and can parse not only Remoting calls, but also XML, JSON, HTML and much more. With them, you may easily detect what is wrong with your Remoting calls, why images are not loading, issues with crossdomain.xml, and issues with Ajax.

Below are the two debugging proxies geared towards Remoting. The general consensus on these two proxies is that ServiceCapture has a better interface while Charles has more features, and that both are much more useful than the NetConnection debugger. Try them both, then decide which one to use after 30 days.

I personally use both of them for different tasks as they each have there strengths.

ServiceCapture

From the ServiceCapture page: "ServiceCapture runs on your pc and captures all HTTP traffic sent from your browser or IDE. It is designed to help Rich Internet Application(RIA) developers in the debugging, analysis, and testing of their applications. "

Features include:

• Reads Flash Remoting (AMF0 and AMF3), and also XML, SOAP and JSON.
• Very clean, easy-to-use interface
• Bandwidth throttling
• URLs to file mapping
• Works with SSL
• Fully functioning 30-day trial
• Single license: 35$

See it here.

Charles web debugging proxy

From the Charles page: "Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information)."

Features include:

• Reads Flash Remoting (AMF0 and AMF3), and also XML, SOAP and JSON.
• Can view data exchanged as plain text, hex data, highlighted data
• Bandwidth throttling
• Reverse proxying
• Works with SSL
• A bunch of advanced features
• 30-day trial (must restart the application every 30 minutes)
• Single license: 50$

See it here.

Visual Poxy

This will work as a simple and free debugging proxy so that you see what data is being sent to and from amfphp.

Step 1, install FoxyProxy:
http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/

Step 2, download this, you will later execute the /bin/VisualProxy.jar file http://www.visualproxy.org/

Step 3, configure FoxProxy:
Add a new proxy with host localhost and port 8900.  In my case, I went to the patterns tab and had it only match on URL's for localhost.

Step 4, make Firefox use the proxy settings, check the following option in the
menu:
Tools > FoxyProxy > Use proxies based on patterns and priorities

Step 5, run VisualProxy:
You may need to load it by doing java -jar VisualProxy.jar or you may be able to just double click on it.

Step 6, perform a test in your browser to see if it worked.