Professional JavaScript for Web Developers, 4th Edition

21Error Handling and Debugging

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding browser error reporting
• Handling errors
• Debugging JavaScript code

WROX.COM DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

Please note that all the code examples for this chapter are available as a part of this chapter's code download on the book's website at www.wrox.com/go/projavascript4e on the Download Code tab.

JavaScript has traditionally been known as one of the most difficult programming languages to debug because of its dynamic nature and years without proper development tools. Errors typically resulted in confusing browser messages such as "object expected" that provided little or no contextual information. The third edition of ECMAScript aimed to improve this situation, introducing the try-catch and throw statements, along with various error types to help developers deal with errors when they occur. A few years later, JavaScript debuggers and debugging tools began appearing for web browsers. By 2008, most web browsers supported some JavaScript debugging capabilities.

Armed with the proper language support and development tools, web developers are now empowered to implement proper error-handling processes and figure out the cause of problems.

BROWSER ERROR REPORTING

All of the major desktop web browsers—Internet Explorer/Edge, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera—have some way to report JavaScript errors to the user. By default, all browsers hide this information, both because it's of little use to anyone but the ...