Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Use Logpoints!

By  on  

There's sometimes a tribal attitude about how web developers should be debugging their code and solving problems. There's the console.log loyalists, then there's the debugger/breakpoint maximalists. I worked on the Firefox DevTools debugger for years and I can tell you my philosophy -- use whichever tool helps you get the job done!

I use console.log for very simple problems, other times when I want an audit trail I can analyze after a series of events to spot the problem and share with others. I use breakpoints when I want to halt execution to to see values and the visual state of the UI. One tool you can use to get the best of both worlds is logpoints, a breakpoint-like mechanism in the devtools debugger that logs instead of halts!

To add a logpoint:

  • open the devtools debugger
  • right-click a line number in a JavaScript file,
  • provide the log message accompanied by any variables you'd like in the log:

You have access to all variables in the current context, which you can add to the logpoint message.

You may be asking "why don't you just add a console.log to your source file manually? Oftentimes you need to debug third party scripts where manually editing the file isn't possible. Even if you do have access to the source file, you don't need to do a bunch of console.log cleanup!

Developer tools are always more popular than believe -- take full advantage of them!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    7 Essential JavaScript Functions

    I remember the early days of JavaScript where you needed a simple function for just about everything because the browser vendors implemented features differently, and not just edge features, basic features, like addEventListener and attachEvent.  Times have changed but there are still a few functions each developer should...

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS :target

    One interesting CSS pseudo selector is :target.  The target pseudo selector provides styling capabilities for an element whose ID matches the window location's hash.  Let's have a quick look at how the CSS target pseudo selector works! The HTML Assume there are any number of HTML elements with...

  • By
    Assign Anchor IDs Using MooTools 1.2

    One of my favorite uses of the MooTools JavaScript library is the SmoothScroll plugin. I use it on my website, my employer's website, and on many customer websites. The best part about the plugin is that it's so easy to implement. I recently ran...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!