Bookmarklet Based Debugging

JavaScript is at a serious disadvantage without a standard console for "print" statements. Everything else has one. The closest thing that you get in a browser environment is the alert function, which is absolutely evil.

This leaves you with one reasonable solution: do your logging in the page somehow. The problem here is that you don't want to clutter the page with debugging tools. The solution to that problem is what we call BBD, or Bookmarklet Based Debugging [3].

Simply create a bookmarklet for javascript:logger.debuggingBookmarklet(), and whack it whenever you want to see what's in the logger. Of course, this means you must drink the MochiKit.Logging kool-aid. It's tangy and sweet, don't worry.

Currently this is an ugly alert, but we'll have something spiffy Real Soon Now, and when we do, you only have to upgrade MochiKit.Logging, not your bookmarklet!

Constructors

LogMessage(num, level, info):

Properties:

num:

Identifier for the log message

level:

Level of the log message ("INFO", "WARN", "DEBUG", etc.)

info:

All other arguments passed to log function as an Array

timestamp:

Date object timestamping the log message

Logger([maxSize]):

A basic logger object that has a buffer of recent messages plus a listener dispatch mechanism for "real-time" logging of important messages.

maxSize is the maximum number of entries in the log. If maxSize >= 0, then the log will not buffer more than that many messages. So if you don't like logging at all, be sure to pass 0.

There is a default logger available named "logger", and several of its methods are also global functions:

logger.log -> log logger.debug -> logDebug logger.warning -> logWarning logger.error -> logError logger.fatal -> logFatal

Logger.prototype.clear():

Clear all messages from the message buffer.

Logger.prototype.dispatchListeners(msg):

Dispatch a log message to all listeners.

Logger.prototype.addListener(ident, filter, listener):

Add a listener for log messages.

ident is a unique identifier that may be used to remove the listener later on.

filter can be one of the following:

null:

listener(msg) will be called for every log message received.

string:

logLevelAtLeast(filter) will be used as the function (see below).

function:

filter(msg) will be called for every msg, if it returns true then listener(msg) will be called.

listener is a function that takes one argument, a log message. A log message is an object (LogMessage instance) that has at least these properties:

num:

A counter that uniquely identifies a log message (per-logger)

level:

A string or number representing the log level. If string, you may want to use LogLevel[level] for comparison.

info:

An Array of objects passed as additonal arguments to the log function.

Logger.prototype.removeListener(ident):

Remove a listener using the ident given to addListener

Logger.prototype.baseLog(level, message[, ...]):

The base functionality behind all of the log functions. The first argument is the log level as a string or number, and all other arguments are used as the info list.

This function is available partially applied as:

Logger.debug	'DEBUG'
Logger.log	'INFO'
Logger.error	'ERROR'
Logger.fatal	'FATAL'
Logger.warning	'WARNING'

For the default logger, these are also available as global functions, see the Logger constructor documentation for more info.

Logger.prototype.getMessages(howMany):

Return a list of up to howMany messages from the message buffer.

Logger.prototype.getMessageText(howMany):

Get a string representing up to the last howMany messages in the message buffer. The default is 30.

The message looks like this:

LAST {messages.length} MESSAGES:
  [{msg.num}] {msg.level}: {m.info.join(' ')}
  [{msg.num}] {msg.level}: {m.info.join(' ')}
  ...

If you want some other format, use Logger.getMessages and do it yourself.

Logger.prototype.debuggingBookmarklet():

Pop up the contents of the logger in a useful way for browsers, currently just an alert with this.getMessageText(). The idea is to make it smarter at some point, and this method allows us to do that without changing any bookmarklets.

Functions

logLevelAtLeast(minLevel):

Return a function that will match log messages whose level is at least minLevel

alertListener(msg):

Ultra-obnoxious alert(...) listener

debug(message[, info[, ...]]):

Log a DEBUG message to the default logger

warning(message[, info[, ...]]):

Log a WARNING message to the default logger

error(message[, info[, ...]]):

Log an ERROR message to the default logger

fatal(message[, info[, ...]]):

Log a FATAL message to the default logger