dojox.analytics for developers and more
Date : 2008 03 14 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianDustin Machi has written about his dojox.analytics package:
dojox.analytics is a small project, both in aspirations and in size. It has a simple goal of logging browser and application data to the server for review. This data can be used to monitor application performance, effectiveness, and quality, or it can be used for custom data collection to identify or monitor a business-specific use case.
The software is a tiny little logger that has a very loosely defined plugin system. It is a collection of objects that monitor some specific aspect of an application or its environment and then pushes the data it collects to the main logger, which in turn pushes this data to a server at a configurable rate. Currently there are plugins for the console, window info, Dojo Toolkit info, mouse position sampling, and mouse click events. Not too complicated, not too difficult, but it opens up a world of utility.
None of this, of course, is a new idea; we build on what exists and what we can see as other uses for a utility. In this case there are a number of different products that do something similar, Google Analytics not least among them. There are also other products such as Firebug for iPhone that essentially do the same thing, but for an entirely different purpose. dojox.analytics is meant only to provide client side code that can enable these other projects, and do so in a way that is simple and will not get in the way of the loading or performance of an application.
You can use the tool with or without the Dojo Toolkit itself. If you using another JavaScript framework, you can simply do this instead of the dojo.require():
PLAIN TEXT HTML:<script type="text/javascript" djConfig="sendDelay: 5000, sampleDelay:10000" src="dojoxAnalytics.js"></script>
Then you can sprinkle code like this throughout your application:
PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:dojox.analytics.addData("SuperImportantModule", "There was a very serious error here");
I like small, useful utilities, like this.
ASIDE: I also noticed a blog post from Dylan talking about the new Dojo, DWR, and Cometd support offerings.