DamnIT Remote Javscript Error Reporting

March 23rd, 2008 Posted by Don Albrecht

Firebug and its kin are awesome for debugging javascript, but once our scripts are in the wild we really don’t have any feedback of any kind about the state of the browser. DamnIT from JupiterIT attempts to alleviate this by providing an automated feedback system for javascript applications.

How it works:

A box appears prompting you to describe your most recent actions:
One of the following occurs:
- you type something and click send
- you click “close”
- 10 seconds pass with you doing nothing
DamnIT emails you the following information:
- Browser
- Page
- HTML Content
- Description (if you entered one)
- Error message
- File name, line number, and stack (if the browser supports them)

On the surface this is an incredible system. In practice there are a few key issues that I think need addressed before the product is an ideal fit for every situation. Basically, I have severe reservations about the email only nature of the system and its dependence on central management. Both of these are key issues when dealing with sensitive information or large volumes of error messages and I’m sure will be addressed with future versions. I am going to integrate the system into the next release of BLT and will be providing feedback from those efforts in the near future. In the short term, you can check out DamnIT here:

https://damnit.jupiterit.com

1 Comment

Justin Meyer
March 23rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm

Don, thanks for the post! Just to clarify a few points on your post …

The system isn’t email only. It records the errors to our system. DamnIT provides limited project management functionality. You can mark errors as accepted, in progress, or closed. It will also show you your most common errors.

Sensitive information is an important issue. Although the information being sent to us is safe (sent via https). You basically hand us the keys to your website as we can execute JavaScript on your website and do anything the user can do.

DamnIT and any other remotely loaded JavaScript (google analytics) shouldn’t be used unless trust the vendor completely.

Another security issue is that your html content is saved on our machines. If we were evil (we aren’t) we could read it. However, it’s save from everyone else.

You’re correct about our future plans with DamnIT. In the very short term, we are going to building something like SubSpace (http://www2007.org/program/paper.php?id=801) to prevent cross site scripting attacks. We will also provide an option not to save the HTML content on our server.

Eventually, there will be a non-central version of DamnIT that people can download and install on their own. This will avoid all the security issues and perform better because it won’t have to be cross domain.