ThoughtWorks Technology Radar: Adopt capturing client-side JavaScript errors

ThoughtWorks has released their 2014 Technology Radar.

The Technology Radar is a very cool concept: lock a bunch of very smart people in a room and have then evaluate and rank the top trending technologies of the day. While not everyone is going to agree with the resulting assessment, it is still a wonderful way to spread awareness and share opinions regarding all this new tech!

I was excited to see that capturing client-side JavaScript errors has made its way to the top of the adopt list!

In 2013 this technique was on the "assess" list, and now in 2014, only one year later, it has jumped up right past the "trail" list and directly on to the "adopt" list. I could not agree more, this is a fantastic technique and I am surprised that it is not more widely adopted...so get to it!

How do you capture client-side JavaScript errors?

Last year wrote a blog post about this very subject. In that post is a description of difficulties and pitfalls in implementing your own client side error capturer, and includes a jQuery specific implementation.

Report Unhandled Errors from JavaScript
JavaScriptErrorReporter on GitHub

So what are you going to do once you have captured these errors? You can start off by simply logging them, as that is always better than nothing. However, it would be ideal to aggregate these exceptions, send notifications regarding them, and even report on their frequency. Well good news: Exceptionless just went open source!

Exceptionless Homepage
Exceptionless on GitHub

Enjoy,
Tom