Sony Developers Share Open Source Tool for Debugging and Fine-Tuning Your Apps

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We have always strongly encouraged developers from the various OEMs to take an active role in the open source community. At times we have seen involvement, but often that doesn’t happen for many different reasons. One of those reasons boils down to an OEM placing their developers in virtual walled gardens, away from “prying eyes” and the rest of the open source community.

At the risk of belaboring the point too much, Sony Mobile continues to raise the bar for the rest of the OEMs out there. They actively encourage their developers to participate in the open source community, and as a result, their developers answer the call and step forward with great tools. One such tool, by Sony Mobile Developer pal.szasz, adds incredible value to mobile app developers out there. And to top it off, it is fully open source. XAppDbg is a tool which you can include in your existing app to allow you to test out certain features and changes without having to rebuild each time. As Pal explains it, the big advantage this brings is when working on the UI for your app, you can try out different settings and immediately see the effects inside the running application.

XAppDbg consists of the server, which runs on the phone, and a client, which runs on the computer. Utilizing Java reflection to scan for fields and methods in the code, XAppDbg opens up the public fields, properties and commands to the client, allowing you to enter in specific arguments to adjust during runtime. Because XAppDbg is written in J2SE, you can use the tool with desktop Java applications as well as Android mobile applications.

Pal created a thread on XDA, as well as a more detailed write up along with instructions and code examples over on Sony’s Developer World and made his source freely available. Make sure to visit both, and show support for his endeavors.