Beyond <cferror>: Keeping on top of your crashes
It doesn’t matter if you’re working on a website, an app or on a complex back end enterprise system. We all know that software is usually not free of bugs. Monitoring your back end systems and having error logging mechanism for them is reasonably common nowadays. Logging issues in client-side apps is usually more complicated and requires some planning and usually additional libraries, but ideally you’d be able to track and follow issues across your tech stack and be notified of critical problems. All of these requirements fall into the bigger bucket of APM (Application Performance Management)
This talk will provide insights into various approaches available to CFML developers. We’ll start by having a look into the different types of exception and error objects you can run into when using ACF or Lucee and some of the underlying Java platforms. While you’re developing, useful information is usually presented to you on the screen or in some kind of device log or browser developer toolkit. But when your system is out there in production, you’ll need some way to look at what’s going on under the hood.
A lot of people have built homegrown solutions over the years and reinvent the wheel over and over again. But Forgebox unveils a bunch of different available integrations: Raygun, Sentry, Bugsnag and others. They all follow a similar approach - sending error information to a cloud system where it’s being analysed and displayed for you in a meaningful way.
If you want to stay closer to home, the Box universe offers Logbox and Stachebox to work with error and logging information and make them easily accessible. Each of these solutions has its pros and cons, some of them can (and should probably) even be mixed-and-matched.
After this session you’ll have a much better understanding of the error logging and crash reporting ecosystem and will have seen common usage patterns. The session will also cover typical organisational concerns such as perceived performance overhead or cost and how to counter and debunk some of these myths by looking at the benefits of a comprehensive error logging solution.
