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42 Chapter 2 PhoneGap Development, Testing, and Debugging
Figure 2-10 ​ ​Eclipse messages area
This pane will display all messages generated by the Android device emulator as
well as console messages written by your PhoneGap application; you can see the
three messages written by the sample application. Use the V (verbose), D (debug),
I (info), W (warning), and E (error) buttons at the top of the pane to filter the contents
of the pane as needed to allow you to more quickly locate the entries you are
looking for while debugging an application.
Google also offers a stand-alone utility called the Dalvik Debug Monitor Server
(DDMS) that you can use to monitor the Android emulator console when testing
PhoneGap applications outside of the Eclipse IDE. To launch the DDMS utility,
you must first launch an Android emulator. Once the emulator is running, open a
file explorer (Finder on Macintosh or Windows Explorer on Windows), navigate
to the Android SDK tools folder, and execute the DDMS utility located therein.
The file is called ddms.bat on Microsoft Windows and ddms on Macintosh.
When the utility launches, it will display a window similar to the one shown in
Figure 2-11. At the top of the utility are windows that show the different processes
running in the emulator on the left and a list of additional options on the right. The
lower half of the application’s window displays the same LogCat pane from the
Eclipse plug-in.
To access the LogCat content from the command line on Windows, open a command
prompt, navigate to the Android SDK platform-tools folder, and issue the
following command:
adb logcat
On Macintosh, open a terminal window, navigate to the Android SDK platformtools
folder, and issue the following command:
./adb logcat