Show HN: Proxino - optimize and monitor your javascript

https://www.proxino.com

by zaveri • 15 years ago

87 25 15 years ago

dstein2• 15 years ago

You can do this pretty easily without a third-party by just using window.onerror, and then doing an ajax request to log it.

unignorant• 15 years ago

Not necessarily -- window.onerror isn't fully supported by some browsers and libraries:

http://blog.proxino.com/post/8388203148/catching-the-worlds-...

dstein2• 15 years ago

Yeah and just as easily you can put a try/catch around your code and do the same ajax logging.

IanDrake• 15 years ago

Am I reading the docs correctly...put your secret key in the client side script block?

https://www.proxino.com/docs/getting_started

zaveri4• 15 years ago

Secret is a misnomer; it is actually a public key.

benatkin2• 15 years ago

Many APIs call it a client key or a client ID. That makes a lot more sense than secret.

I suggest that Proximo change it in their API and in their docs.

ben_hall• 15 years ago

What happens if Proxino goes down?

zaveri4• 15 years ago

Your scripts will load from local urls. More details on this can be found in the docs: https://www.proxino.com/docs/getting_started

benatkin2• 15 years ago

Wow, that's pretty nifty. Somehow I missed it when I looked at the home page. Did you change it? If not, I think I might have missed it because local was only in the finer print. If the header said "Worry Free Local Fallbacks" I think more visitors will notice it.

BTW please see my other comment about changing the API; "secret" in client-side JavaScript is confusing.

Edit: never mind, didn't realize my other comment was replying to you. You've already noticed that secret is a misnomer. :)

JeremyBanks2• 15 years ago

Does that work for CoffeeScript files? Looking at proxino.js, it doesn't appear to work for it. If you could have a version that included the CoffeeScript compiler, I'd be very likely to use this.

tmcw• 15 years ago

Any indication of what you get out of this service? I know the fundamentals, but the site's sneak-peek content consists of a TextMate screenshot and documentation. That's all push - what's the pull?

yodasan• 15 years ago

This was originally posted 2 weeks ago before their name change from Taazr to Proxino. For original discussions on the site: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2833945

kalvin• 15 years ago

I'm going to repost this here because it actually tells me why I'd want to route all my JS through a third party, and I had to click through the blog link below to find it:

http://blog.proxino.com/post/8388203148/catching-the-worlds-...

"At Proxino, there’s one question I receive with uncommon frequency: why the proxy? After all, we only ever (at the moment) handle exceptions for you, and so there is curiosity. Is it really necessary, my customer will ask. He considers, perhaps, that the proxy is some clever ploy, a small glimpse at our plans for world domination. A lovely thought, if only it were so. Developers in particular have a tendency to believe that what Proxino does can be done dynamically. They are mistaken.

In a general sense, what Proxino does is a form of global exception handling, a way to catch every exception that occurs within your Javascript. To their credit, our customers correctly suspect that some approximation of this can be achieved dynamically. For it certainly can. Here is a naive first pass attempt at such a global handler, no proxy required:

window.onerror = function(e){ console.log(e) }

Unfortunately, window.onerror does not work in every browser, nor on every piece of code. It will fail to catch some exceptions raised by elements of jQuery, and other similarly complex libraries. It’s a simple one-liner, and it sort of works. But quite often, sort of is not enough.

With a bit more care — and a lot more code — a clever programmer can find dynamic work arounds for most browsers and most popular libraries. However in the general case, a global exception handler constructed dynamically is something of an elusive, asymptotic state. You are simply not going to get there. And this brings me to my point. Proxino is not interested in most. We want to catch, and tell you about, everything that goes wrong in your Javascript. Enter the proxy.

When a request reaches proxy.proxino.com, we lookup your existing code, parse it into AST form, and walk down the tree inserting special try/catch blocks within each function definition, as well as around the file itself. We then serve this instrumented file to your users, and handle every exception that occurs. Naturally, we have optimized this process for speed (with caching, etc.) but this guarantees us — and more importantly, you — complete code coverage. You will know about every exception.

Dynamic approaches are incredibly convenient in some ways, but in the general case they simply don’t work. And so there is a Good reason for the proxy. Hope this helps."

Cushman• 15 years ago

Hmm— I wonder how that works with exception-handling code. It'd be a pain in the ass to get notifications for normal behavior.

They must have thought of this, and it'd easy enough to ignore functions that are already inside `try` blocks, but it's strange that it's not mentioned.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

I haven't looked at it yet, but perhaps they rethrow exceptions. This will mess up line numbers in stack traces but otherwise should behave similarly to original code.

toast76• 15 years ago

This is really cool, and exactly what I need.

Consider me signed up.

wyclif• 15 years ago

Is it not proper to spell JavaScript with a capital J and S?

strager• 15 years ago

Either Javascript or JavaScript is acceptable.

Stratoscope• 15 years ago

What do you think of Jquery?

photon_off• 15 years ago

I'm interested, but before I continue I'd like to see screenshots or a demo so I can get a feel for the product.

Show HN: Proxino - optimize and monitor your javascript

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