Adobe Air Log File Watcher

Aug 9, 2008 programming

This post is more than 18 months old. Since technology changes too rapidly, this content may be out of date (but that's not always the case). Please remember to verify any technical or programming information with the current release.

One of the biggest pet peeves I have is when errors are generated on PHP files between redirects using the header() function. Especially if they’re not a fatal error, you never get to see them! Also, missing files that hit the apache logs usually are not found later until you review the logs as well. I thought: wouldn’t it be great if there was a tool that would watch these log files for me? (yes, a while ago, I talked about the perl “tail” script that I used in my eclipse to watch these… but… this is even better). Well there is a solution! My first Adobe Air application: Log File Watcher!

This was my first attempt at using Adobe Air - and I’d have to say I like it. This application is very ugly - I didn’t really use any CSS or anything. I used JS and HTML - no action script (well besides AIR’s built in stuff…).

Basically, I found some examples online and pieced them all together - and it worked! So yay. (Also, a good portion of this was done while working at SuperDev - sooo… shhhh)

Anyway, when you first start out the application, you can choose 1 or more files for it to watch. Then, when you click to start the watching, the application minimizes to the tray. (at least in windows…). Then, it will generate a popup whenever there is a change in any of the files that you’re watching.

Yeh, not great, but it was a start.

I’ve attached the AIR application - and a zip with the source in it. If I find time later, I might come back and rewrite it to be 1) prettier and 2) more useful. hah!

Adobe Air Application: logfilewatcher.air

Adobe Air Source files: logfilewatcher.zip