Section 7.1. Two Sides to Debugging

7.1. Two Sides to Debugging

When you look at an AJAX application, it is important to remember that there are two sides to the equation: the server, which interacts with the back end, and the client, which adds interactivity to the user's environment. Although this two-sided model has always existed, what has changed dramatically with the rise of AJAX is the complexity of the code running on the client. A secondary complexity is the number of interaction points between the two sides. Added complexity always makes debugging harder, so your focus when debugging an AJAX application needs to be on the various ways you can reduce that complexity.

The first step to debugging any problems is to separate the two sides as much as possible. This is generally an easy process on the server side; if you are generating HTML page chunks, you can go to the URL and inspect the output, looking for errors generated by the server code. If you're using a JSON or other RPC-based approach, it's slightly harder. However, you can always check the code that is being run by the RPC call, using normal development tools to look at its state before it's encoded. Many people find unit tests to be especially helpful in verifying the operation of the server-side code. It's especially useful for applications that expose chunks of functionality as services to the client. Unit tests work well on the server side because every major language has mature tools for managing these processes, and it narrows the type of problems you'll see on the data-production side.

On the JavaScript side, unit tests have a harder time being effective. This is due both to the lack of tools and the difficulty of testing an environment that relies on user-created events. There are a number of jUnit ports to JavaScript, and by using these testing frameworks and working hard, you can successfully use unit tests on the JavaScript side as well. Unit tests are a tool, and in AJAX development, they can be powerful because they provide a framework to test both sides of the equation separately. Note, however, that they are not your only option. The most important item to remember is to debug the easy stuff first. If you get an error, always verify that your server-side code is working properly before moving on to the JavaScript.