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Monday, March 09, 2009

Debugging Vexi Applications II

As we've used Vexi over the last year, we have added little features here and there to help us get the most of out it.

I'm always mindful of performance, so I don't like to use the 'try/throw/catch' method from the previous debugging tip in production code. However chopping and changing code in a complex environment can be a pain, especially when you are working with code that has a far reaching impact and you want to be able to get a general sense of what is happening as you use your application.

For this, I added the 'vexi.debug' property. A simple boolean on the Vexi object, which can be enabled by either running vexi with the '-debug' flag or by putting 'true' or 'false' to the 'vexi.debug' property.

This way, we can wrap fairly complex debugging operations in an if statement and avoid them in normal running. For instance, we introduced 'vexi.js.stringify(arg)' which takes a JS object and returns it as JSON. Doing this in heavily run code can be a bit of a waste of CPU power, but at the same time JSON is much more useful for debugging than the type/hash representation (e.g. object$1ab23e) of non-primitives.

if (vexi.debug) {
    var o = anExpensiveOperation();
    vexi.trace(info);
}

Also, there is the call to vexi.trace which is another new function. It is shorthand for:

vexi.log.info(vexi.js.stringify(o));

Of course, the ideal way to avoid days of debugging headaches is to do proper unit testing. It takes time to get it right, but once you have a non-trivial application, a suite of tests can save you no end of trouble and make sure your application remains solid after major changes to the code. See the VUnit documentation for more information on how to create tests.

Marketing Vexi

A revamp of the marketing message for Vexi is long overdue. At the moment, the front page of the Vexi website is just a bit of a technical mess. I need to work out exactly how to portray Vexi as a useful tool in today's market which is very favourable to Web 2.0 and not so favourable to technologies that fall outside of this misguided "inside the browser" paradigm. The message has to be much more subtle than simply stating that we believe everybody else is wrong, but it has to assuage that conclusion upon a visitor.

Technical advantages: integrated unit testing (VUnit), trap model, box layout, browser independence (Java 1.4 compatible), enhanced JavaScript (VexiScript), sandbox security, complete UI control, intuitive syntax, and more.

We can put these in a giant list and they'll appeal to some people, but to those whose mind is already made up, a different approach is required - illuminating the benefits brought to application development using a platform with the aforementioned technical advantages. Of course, examples are always good, and we have something major to show the world Real Soon Now (tm).

To be continued...

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