Blackbird takes the pain out of JavaScript logging

Brian Dillard, Thursday, October 9, 2008 @ 11:23 am

I'm excited to announce the arrival of Blackbird, an open-source JavaScript logging and profiling utility written by G. Scott Olson, a former colleague from my days at Orbitz Worldwide.

A previous iteration of Blackbird provided no-nonsense, cross-browser logging on a variety of projects within Orbitz. Since that iteration, known as jsLogger, Scott has re-written the code from the ground up; provided tons of useful new features, including custom namespacing and a spiffy new graphical interface; and released it under an MIT license.

Why, you might ask, in the age of Firebug, would anybody need a JavaScript logging utility? Simple:

• Blackbird works in a wide variety of modern browsers. Write one style of log statement for every browser.
• Blackbird can be deployed to production. By stubbing out its public API with empty functions, you can leave your log statements in production code. (I'm not endorsing this approach to code maintenance, just pointing out that Blackbird makes it easy.)
• Blackbird does one thing and does it well. It's not a debugger, it's just a logger and profiler.
• Blackbird doesn't interfere with Firebug's console.log utility, but it does improve on its interface. You can hide or show the Blackbird modal with a single, customizable keystroke. You can also choose from four levels of logging (debug, info, warning and error) and atomically toggle their visibility within the console.

The Blackbird project now lives at Google Code, where you can download it and learn about how to contribute.

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Comments: 3 so far

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1. 

   Just tried the utility. Works like a charm! Much better than alert for sure.

   Comment by Michael Dubakov, Wednesday, October 15, 2008 @ 4:18 pm

2. 

   Do they have a discussion forum? I can’t find any.

   Comment by paul, Wednesday, October 15, 2008 @ 4:30 pm

3. 

   Blackbird looks very nice, but isn’t it reinventing the wheel somewhat? There are loads of cross-browser JavaScript logging packages available (see http://ajaxpatterns.org/Javascript_Logging_Frameworks for one list), ranging from the lightweight jsLog to my own log4javascript (http://log4javascript.org), which is a larger but considerably more fully-featured framework (e.g. advanced console with regular expression search, command line and other features, plus server logging via Ajax, several layouts for log message formatting)

   Comment by Tim Down, Monday, November 3, 2008 @ 5:17 pm

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