Blackbird - Open Source JavaScript Logging Utility | Hacker News Reader

Blackbird - Open Source JavaScript Logging Utility

gscottolson.com

36 pointsmgamer11 comments

Besides the different logging levels, I don't think this brings much improvement over console.log. I think I'll stick with that.

I suppose this could be very useful in debugging in IE. But the way IE shuts down the JS interpreter once an error in encountered may just render it useless anyway. Will have to try it out.

When I tried it out late last week, I could not get it to run. Installed using the sources provided in the download.

The error was 'blackbird Cannot read property 'style' of undefined'

I found this project a few days ago while looking for a javascript logging framework. It looks slick, but I think I'll stick to my choice of using log4javascript due to it's support for logging to a server via AJAX -- this is a very important feature for a JS logging framework, as far as I am concerned.

Isn't this what Tapestry uses for client side error messaging? It's actually pretty useful for including in web-app frameworks: you can alert the developer to framework errors which might go un-noticed if just written to console.log. Of course you can disable in production.

On a side note, I've wondered how useful/practical server-side logging of js running client-side would be. For keeping track of what your users are doing, errors thrown etc.

That's not a bad idea. Some suggestions/ideas:

- It would need to be asynchronous

- It would be nice to collect a log locally and send it centrally under specific circumstances (e.g. an error occurs send everything that has been logged so far)

- Using some kind of local storage option might be nice (e.g. the interface to SQLite that WebKit-based browsers have).

It'd be fairly simple I think: a global object with .info(), .debug() etc methods. You'd have to make x-domain ajax calls to post back the message as the log server would have to run on another port. Various config options to change server, port, log-level defaults. And then a simple server to handle the posts and write out to log file on disk. You could even have a hosted/cloud service for those that didn't want to run their own logging server.

ha - already exists: http://log4javascript.org/

It's nice, the only thing is, if your site's style sheet uses class names like "error", "debug" and so on, it will mess up the log window.

You have 2 options: 1 - modify your styles 2 - modify blackbird styles + code

I'll stick to console.log as well but a great tool nevertheless.

MochiKit has LoggingPane (works in IE): http://mochi.github.com/mochikit/doc/html/MochiKit/LoggingPa...

Would be useful for me if it supported mobile browsers. Maybe bring up the logging GUI by doing a "secret" gesture?

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